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Judge Pirro - Obama Admin Caught Red Handed Russia Knew More Then NSA On Boston Bombing 5/4/13 (VIDEO)
http://xrepublic.tv/node/3932
Shermann
The NSA and 911 - Ryan Dawson - Video
I Missed this Info!!!
http://www.rys2sense.com/anti-neocons/viewtopic.php?f=114&t=32199
Shermann
The Hidden Secrets of Money Episode 1- Currency Vs Money (VIDEO)
A great Listen!!!
http://undergrounddocumentaries.com/the-hidden-secrets-of-money-episode-1-currency-vs-money/
Shermann
Noam Chomsky: Obama's Policies Are Creating Terrorism Around the World
June 19, 2013
GRITtv [1] / By Laura Flanders [2]
If ever you accused Barack Obama of fearing to offend or suffering from lack of spine, you have to hand it to him now: President Obama is acting more and more like a leader every day, one specific leader in fact: George W. Bush.
Take the recent disclosures about the National Security Agency's massive spying on the world. The data dragnet mimics the worst of the Bush administration.
It's hypocritical in the extreme to gather data in the name of preventing terrorism while the administration's own policies are creating terrorism around the world, says MIT professor emeritus, Noam Chomsky in this GRITtv exclusive interview. [3]
http://blip.tv/grittv/noam-chomsky-on-secrecy-terrorism-and-google-6604821
Matt Taibbi: The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis
It's long been suspected that ratings agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's helped trigger the meltdown. A new trove of embarrassing documents shows how they did it.
The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis
by Matt Taibbi, June 19, 2013
(special thanks to basserdan and investor15)
What about the ratings agencies?
That's what "they" always say about the financial crisis and the teeming rat's nest of corruption it left behind. Everybody else got plenty of blame: the greed-fattened banks, the sleeping regulators, the unscrupulous mortgage hucksters like spray-tanned Countrywide ex-CEO Angelo Mozilo.
But what about the ratings agencies? Isn't it true that almost none of the fraud that's swallowed Wall Street in the past decade could have taken place without companies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's rubber-stamping it? Aren't they guilty, too?
Man, are they ever. And a lot more than even the least generous of us suspected.
Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation's two top ratings companies, Moody's and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.
In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.
"Lord help our fucking scam?.?.?.?this has to be the stupidest place I have worked at," writes one Standard & Poor's executive. "As you know, I had difficulties explaining 'HOW' we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it," confesses a high-ranking S&P analyst. "If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants [quantitative analysts] are of precious little value," complains another senior S&P man. "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card[s] falters," ruminates one more.
Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together. These gigantic companies – also known as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, or NRSROs – have teams of examiners who analyze companies, cities, towns, countries, mortgage borrowers, anybody or anything that takes on debt or creates an investment vehicle.
Their primary function is to help define what's safe to buy, and what isn't. A triple-A rating is to the financial world what the USDA seal of approval is to a meat-eater, or virginity is to a Catholic. It's supposed to be sacrosanct, inviolable: According to Moody's own reports, AAA investments "should survive the equivalent of the U.S. Great Depression."
It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.
That this happened is even more amazing because these companies naturally have powerful leverage over their clients, as they are part of a quasi-protected industry that enjoys massive de facto state subsidies. Largely that's because government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission often force private companies to fulfill regulatory requirements by retaining or keeping in reserve certain fixed quantities of assets – bonds, securities, whatever – that have been rated highly by a "Nationally Recognized" ratings agency, like the "Big Three" of Moody's, S&P and Fitch. So while they're not quite part of the official regulatory infrastructure, they might as well be.
It's not like the iniquity of the ratings agencies had gone completely unnoticed before. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission published a case study in 2011 of Moody's in particular and discovered that between 2000 and 2007, the agency gave nearly 45,000 mortgage-backed securities AAA ratings. One year Moody's doled out AAA ratings to 30 mortgage-backed securities every day, 83 percent of which were ultimately downgraded. "This crisis could not have happened without the rating agencies," the commission concluded.
Thanks to these documents, we now know how that happened. And showing as they do the back-and-forth between the country's top ratings agencies and one of America's biggest investment banks (Morgan Stanley) in advance of two major subprime deals, they also lay out in detail the evolution of the industrywide fraud that led to implosion of the world economy – how banks, hedge funds, mortgage lenders and ratings agencies, working at an extraordinary level of cooperation, teamed up to disguise and then sell near-worthless loans as AAA securities. It's the black box in the American financial airplane.
In April, Moody's and Standard & Poor's settled the lawsuits for a reported $225 million. Brought by a diverse group of institutional plaintiffs with King County, Washington, and the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank taking the lead, the suits accused the ratings agencies of conspiring in the mid-to-late 2000s with Morgan Stanley to fraudulently induce heavy investment into a pair of doomed-to-implode subprime-laden deals, called Cheyne and Rhinebridge.
Stock prices for both companies soared at the settlement, with markets believing the firms would be spared the hell of reams of embarrassing evidence thrust into public view at trial. But in a quirk, an earlier judge's ruling had already made most of the documents in the case public. Although a few news outlets, including The New York Times, took note at the time, the vast majority of the material was never reported, and some was never seen by reporters at all. The cases revolved around a highly exotic and complex financial instrument called a SIV, or structured investment vehicle.
The SIV is a not-so-distant cousin of the special purpose entity, or SPE, which was the main weapon of destruction in the Enron scandal. The corporate scam du jour in those days was mass accounting fraud, in which a company would create an ostensibly independent corporate structure that would actually be controlled by its own executives, who would then move their company's liabilities off their own books and onto the remote-controlled SPE, hiding the firm's losses.
The SIV is a similar concept. They first started showing up in the late Eighties after banks discovered a loophole in international banking standards that allowed them to create SPE-like repositories full of assets like mortgage-backed securities and keep them off their own books.
These behemoths operated on the same basic concept as an ordinary bank, which borrows short-term cash from depositors and then lends money long-term in the form of things like mortgages, business loans, etc. The SIV did the same thing, borrowing short-term from investors and then investing long-term on things like student loans, car loans, subprime mortgages. Like banks, a SIV made money on the spread between its short-term debt and long-term investments. If a SIV borrowed on the commercial paper market at 3 percent but earned 6.5 percent on subprime mortgages, that was an easy 3.5 percent profit.
The big difference is a bank has regulatory capital requirements. A SIV doesn't, and being technically independent, its potential liabilities don't show up on the books of the megabank that created it. So the SIV structure allowed investment banks to create and take advantage of, without risk, billions of dollars of things like subprime loans, which became the centerpiece of the new trendy corporate scam – creating and then selling masses of risky mortgage-backed securities as AAA investments to institutional suckers.
Ratings agencies helped this game along in two ways. First, banks needed them to sign off on the bogus math of the subprime era – the math that allowed banks to turn pools of home loans belonging to people so broke they couldn't even afford down payments into securities with higher credit ratings than corporations with billions of dollars in assets. But banks also needed the ratings agencies to sign off on the safety and reliability of these off-balance-sheet SIV structures.
The first of the two SIVs in question was dreamed up by a London-based hedge fund called Cheyne Capital Management (pronounced like Dick "Cheney"), run by an ex-Morgan Stanley banker duo who hired their old firm to build and stock this vast floating Death Star of subprime loans.
Morgan Stanley had multiple motives for putting together the Cheyne deal. For one thing, it earned what the bank's lead structurer affectionately called "big fat upfront fees," which bank executives estimated would eventually add up to $25 million or $30 million. It was a lucrative business, and the top dogs wanted the deal badly. "I am very focused on?.?.?.?getting this deal done to get NY to stop freaking out" and "to make our money," said Robert Rooney, the senior Morgan Stanley executive on the deal. A spokesman for Morgan Stanley, however, told Rolling Stone, "Our sole economic interest was in the ongoing success of the SIV."
But that wasn't Morgan Stanley's only motive. Not only could the bank make the "big fat upfront fees" for structuring the deal, they could also turn around and sell scads of their own mortgage-backed securities to the SIV, which in turn would be marketed to investors like Abu Dhabi and King County. In Cheyne, 25 percent of the original assets in the deal came from Morgan Stanley – over time, $2 billion of the SIV's $9 billion to $10 billion portfolio of assets came from the bank as well.
Internal Morgan Stanley memorandums show that the bank knowingly stuffed mortgages in the SIV whose borrowers were, to say the least, highly suspect. "The real issue is that the loan requests do not make sense," complained a Morgan Stanley employee back in 2005. He noted loans had been made to a "tarot reading house" operator who claimed to make $12,000 a month, and a "knock off gold club distributor" who claimed to make $16,000 a month. "Compound these issues," he groaned, "with the fact that we are seeing what I would call a lot of this type of profile."
No matter – into the soup it went! Morgan sold mountains of this crap into Cheyne's SIV, where it was destined to be sold off to other suckers down the line. The only thing that could possibly get in the way of the scam was some pesky ratings agency.
Fortunately for the bank and the hedge fund, these subprime SIVs were a relatively new kind of investment product, so the ratings agencies had little to go on in the area of historical data to measure these products. One might think this would make the ratings agencies more conservative. In fact, caution in the face of the unknown was supposed to be a core value for these companies. As Moody's put it, "Triple-A structures should not be highly dependent on untestable assumptions."
But when it came to the Cheyne SIV, Moody's punted on caution. In an e-mail sent to executives from both Morgan Stanley and Cheyne in May 2005, David Rosa, a Moody's senior analyst, admitted that when it came to this SIV, he had nothing to go on.
"Please note that in relation to assumed spread [volatility] for the Aa and A there is no actual data backing up the current model assumptions," he wrote. In lieu of such data, he went on, "We will for now accept the proposal to use the same levels as [residential mortgage-backed securities] given that this assumption is supported by the analysis of the Aaa data?.?.?.?and Cheyne's comments on their views of this asset class."
Translation: We have no historical data, so we'll just accept your reasoning for the time being, even though you have every incentive in the world to lie about the quality of your product.
At one point, a Morgan Stanley analyst even claimed that the bank had written, in Moody's name, an entire 12-page "New Issue Report" for the Cheyne SIV – a kind of ratings summary in which Morgan Stanley appears to have given itself AAA ratings for large chunks of the deal. "I attach the Moody's NIR (that we ended up writing)," yawns Morgan Stanley fixed-income employee Rany Moubarak in a March 2006 e-mail. The attached document came proudly affixed with the "Moody's Investors Service" logo. (Both Moody's and Morgan Stanley deny that anyone other than Moody's wrote that report.)
Morgan Stanley ended up getting both Moody's and S&P to rate the deal, and that was not only common, it was basically industry practice. There were many reasons for this, but a big one was a concept called "notching," in which the agencies gave ratings penalties to any instrument that had not been rated by their own company. If a SIV contained a basket of mortgage-backed securities rated AA by Standard & Poor's, Moody's might "notch" those underlying securities down to A, or even lower. This incentivized the banks to hire as many ratings agencies as possible to rate every investment vehicle they created.
Again, despite the fact that the ratings agencies enjoyed broad quasi-official subsidies, and despite the powerful market leverage that techniques like "notching" gave them, they still routinely chose to roll over for banks. And the biggest companies were equally guilty. In the case of the Cheyne deal, Standard & Poor's was every bit as craven as Moody's.
In September 2004, an S&P analyst named Lapo Guadagnuolo sent an e-mail to Stephen McCabe, the agency's lead "quant" on the Cheyne deal, who apparently was on vacation. The e-mail chain was mostly a bunch of office gossip, where the two men e-whispered about an employee who was about to quit. But sandwiched in the office banter was an offhand line about the Cheyne deal and how full of shit it was. "Hi Steve!" Guadagnuolo wrote cheerily, adding, "How is Australia and how was Thailand????Back to [Cheyne]?.?.?.?As you know, I had difficulties explaining 'HOW' we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it?.?.?.
"Thanks and regards?.?.?.?have you heard that [redacted] has resigned .?.?. and somebody else will follow suit today!!"
McCabe, blowing off the "no science behind it" comment, answered eagerly, "Who, Who, Who????" The quadruple question mark must be an S&P-ism.
A month later, McCabe seemed more concerned about the lack of science in the Cheyne deal. He complained in an e-mail to his boss, Kai Gilkes, who was the agency's senior quantitative analyst in Europe.
"From looking at the numbers it is quite obvious that we have just stuck our preverbal [sic] finger in the air!!" he fumed.
Gilkes was experiencing his own crisis of conscience by mid-2005, complaining in an oddly wistful e-mail to another S&P employee that the good old days of just giving things the ratings they deserved were disappearing. "Remember the dream of being able to defend the model with sound empirical research?" he wrote on June 17th, 2005. "If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants are of precious little value."
Frank Parisi, Standard & Poor's chief credit officer for structured finance, was even more downtrodden, saying that the model that his company used to rate residential mortgage-backed securities in 2005 and 2006 was only marginally more accurate than "if you just simply flipped a coin."
Given all of this, why would top analysts from both Moody's and Standard & Poor's rate such a massive deal like Cheyne without any science to back it up? The answer was simple: money. In the old days, ratings agencies lived on subscriptions sold to investors, meaning they were compensated – indirectly, incidentally – by the people buying the financial products.
But over time, that model morphed into the current "issuer pays" model, in which a company like Moody's or Standard & Poor's is paid directly by the "issuer" – i.e., the company that is actually making the financial product.
For Cheyne, for instance, the agencies were paid in the area of $1 million to $1.5 million to rate the deal by Morgan Stanley, the very company with an interest in getting a high rating. It's the ultimate in negative incentives, and was and continues to be a major impediment to honest analysis on Wall Street. Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, one of the few lawmakers to focus on reforming the ratings agencies after the crash, put it this way: "It's like one of the parties in court paying the judge's salary."
Thanks to this model, ratings-agency business soared during the bubble era. A Senate report found that fees for the "Big Three" doubled between 2002 and 2007, from $3 billion to $6 billion. Fees for rating mortgage-backed securities at both Moody's and S&P nearly quadrupled.
So there were powerful incentives to whitewash deals like Cheyne. The eventual president of Moody's, Brian Clarkson, actually copped to this awful truth in writing, in a 2004 internal e-mail. "To put it bluntly," he wrote, "the issuer could take its business elsewhere unless the rating agency provides a higher rating."
Both Moody's and Standard & Poor's employees described complex/exotic new financial products like CDOs and SIVs as "cash cows," and behind closed doors, executives talked openly about the financial pressure to give scientifically unfounded analysis to products the banks wanted to sell.
The minutes from a 2007 conference of Standard & Poor's executives show that the raters knew they were in way over their heads. Admitting that it was virtually impossible to accurately rate, say, a synthetic derivative loan deal with underlying assets in China and Russia, one executive candidly admits, "We do not have the capacity nor the skills in house to rate something like this." Another counters, "Market pressures have significantly risen due to 'hot money.'" The first retorts that bankers are pushing boundaries, asking the raters to help them play the highly cynical hot-potato game, in which bad loans are originated en masse and then instantly passed off to suckers who will take on all the risk. "Bankers say why not originate bad loans, there is no penalty," the executive muses.
Hilariously – or tragically, depending on your point of view – an S&P executive at the conference even tossed off a quick visual sketch of their company's moral quandary. The picture is atrociously drawn (it looks like a junior high school student's rendering of a ganglion cell) and comes across like the Wall Street version of Hamlet, showing the industry traveling down a road and reaching a "Choice Point" crossroads, where the two options are "To Rate" and "Not Rate."
The former – basically taking the money and just rating whatever crap the banks toss their way – is crudely depicted as a wide, "well marked super highway." Meanwhile the honorable thing, not rating shitty investments, is shown to be a skinny little roadlet, marked "Dark and narrow path less traveled."
Obviously, the ratings agencies like S&P ultimately decided to take the road more traveled, choosing profits over scruples. Not that there wasn't some token resistance at first. For instance, some at S&P hesitated to allow the use of a questionable technique called "grandfathering," in which old and outdated rating models were used to rate newly issued investments.
In one damning e-mail chain in November 2005, a Morgan Stanley banker complains to an S&P executive named Elwyn Wong that S&P was preventing him from putting S&P ratings on Morgan Stanley deals that used this grandfathering technique. "My business is on 'pause' right now," the banker complains.
Wong took the news that S&P was holding up deals over the grandfathering issue badly. "Lord help our fucking scam," he said. "This has to be the stupidest place I have worked at." Wong, incidentally, was later hired by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller Currency, our top federal banking regulator.
The purists, however, couldn't hold out for long. In the Cheyne case, when one of the "quants" tried to hold the line, Morgan Stanley went over their heads to someone on the business side at the company to get the rating it wanted.
In July 2004, for instance, analyst Lapo Guadagnuolo sent an e-mail to Morgan Stanley's point man on the Cheyne deal, Gregg Drennan, and told him that the best he could do for the "mezzanine capital notes" or "MCN" piece of the SIV – a piece that Drennan wanted at least an A rating for – was BBB-plus. Drennan responded in an e-mail that CC'd Guadagnuolo's boss, Perry Inglis, telling him that Morgan Stanley "believe[s] the position the committee is taking is very inappropriate."
Ultimately, the analyst committee agreed to give the dubious Mezzanine Notes an A rating, marking the first time these middle-tier investments in a SIV ever received a public A rating. For Wall Street, this was occasion to par-tay. In the summer of 2005, one of the Cheyne hedge-funders sent out a celebratory e-mail to Morgan Stanley execs, bragging about getting the ratings companies to cave. "It is an amazing set of feats to move the rating agencies so far," the hedgie wrote. "We all do all this for one thing and I hope promotions are a given. Let's hope big bonuses are to follow."
Later on, S&P caved even further, agreeing to allow Morgan Stanley to lower the "capital buffer" in the deal protecting investors without suffering a ratings penalty. As late as February 1st, 2006, Guadagnuolo was defiantly telling Morgan Stanley that the one-percent buffer was a "pillar of our analysis." But by the next day, Morgan Stanley executive Moubarak had chopped Guadagnuolo's knees out. He cheerfully announced in a group e-mail that the bank had managed to remove this "pillar" and get the buffer knocked down to .75 percent.
Tina Sprinz, who worked for the Cheyne hedge fund, sent an e-mail that very day to Moubarak, thanking him for straightening out the pesky analysts. "Thanks for negotiating that," she says. The ratings process shouldn't be a "negotiation," yet this word appears throughout these documents.
In the Cheyne deal, just the plaintiffs in the lawsuit invested a total of $980 million in "rated notes," and those who invested in these "MCNs" were completely wiped out. Analysts from both agencies would express regret and/or trepidation about their roles in unleashing the monster deals and their failure to stop the business-side suits running the companies from selling them out. Gilkes, the S&P analyst who worried about shunning real science in favor of just making things up, later testified that the subprime assets in such SIVs were "not appropriate."
"They should not have been rated," he said.
If the significance of Cheyne is that it showed how the ratings agencies sold out in an effort to get business, the significance of the next deal, Rhinebridge, is that it showed how low they were willing to stoop to keep that business.
Rhinebridge was a subprime-packed SIV structured very much like Cheyne, only both the quality of the underlying crap in the SIV and the timing of the SIV's launch were significantly more horrible than even Cheyne's.
Not only did Morgan Stanley insist that the ratings agencies allow the bank to pack Rhinebridge full of a much higher quantity of subprime than in the Cheyne deal, they were also pushing this massive blob of toxic mortgages at a time when the subprime market was already approaching full collapse.
In fact, the Rhinebridge deal would launch with high ratings from both agencies on June 27th, 2007, less than two weeks before both Moody's and S&P would downgrade hundreds of subprime mortgage-backed securities. In other words, both Moody's and S&P were almost certainly in the process of downgrading the underlying assets in the Rhinebridge SIV even as they were preparing to launch Rhinebridge with AAA-rated notes.
"It was the briefest AAA rating in history," says the plaintiffs' lawyer Dan Drosman. "Rhinebridge went from AAA to junk in a matter of months."
There is an enormous documentary record in both agencies showing that analysts and executives knew a bust was coming long before they sent Rhinebridge out into the world with a AAA label. As early as 2005, S&P was talking in internal memorandums about a "bubble" in the real-estate markets, and in 2006 it knew that there had been "rampant appraisal and underwriting fraud for quite some time," causing "rising delinquencies" and "nightmare mortgages."
In June 2007, the same month Rhinebridge was launched, S&P's Board of Directors Report talked about a total collapse of the market. "The meltdown of the subprime-mortgage market will increase both foreclosures and the overhang of homes for sale."
It was no better at Moody's, where in June 2007, executives were internally discussing "increased amounts of lying on income" and "increased amounts of occupancy misstatements" in mortgage applications. Clarkson, who would become president two months later, was told the week before Rhinebridge launched that "most players in the market" believed subprime would "perform extremely poorly," and that the problems were "quite serious."
Yet the two ratings agencies not only kept those concerns private, they both took outlandish steps to declare just the opposite.
In a pair of matching public papers, both Moody's and S&P proclaimed that summer that while subprime might be going to hell, subprime-packed investments like SIVs might be just fine. The Moody's report on July 18th read "SIVs: An Oasis of Calm in the Sub-prime Maelstrom," while an S&P report on August 14th, 2007, was titled "Report Says SIV Ratings Are Weathering Current Market Disruptions."
The S&P report was so brazen that it even shocked a Morgan Stanley banker involved in the SIV deals. "I cannot believe these morons would reaffirm in this market," chortled the banker in an e-mail the day after the paper was released.
Rhinebridge, cheyne and a hell of a lot of other subprime investments ultimately blew to smithereens, taking with them vast amounts of cash – 40 percent of the world's wealth was wiped out in the aftermath of the mortgage bubble, according to some estimates. 2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction. If you can imagine a post-9/11 scenario where there were no metal detectors at airports and people could walk on carrying chain saws and meat cleavers, you get a rough idea of what was done to reform the ratings process.
Specifically, very little was done to change the way AAA ratings are created – the "issuer pays" model still exists, and the "Big Three" retain roughly the same market share. An effort by Minnesota Sen. Al Franken to change the compensation model through a new approach under which agencies would be assigned randomly to rate new issues through a government agency passed overwhelmingly in the Senate, but in the House it was relegated to a study by the SEC – which released its findings last year, calling for?.?.?. more study. "The conflict of interest still exists in the exact same way," says a frustrated Franken.
The companies by now are all the way back in black. In 2012, for instance, Moody's profits soared 22 percent, to $1.18 billion. McGraw-Hill, the parent company of Standard & Poor's, scored $437 million in profits last year, with the rating business accounting for 70 percent of the company's profits.
In February, the Obama Justice Department, in an action that seems belated, filed a $5 billion civil suit against Standard & Poor's, drawing upon some of the same data and documents that were part of the Cheyne and Rhinebridge suits. As part of that action, high-ranking officials at S&P were interviewed by government investigators and admitted that they had shaded their ratings methodologies to protect market share. In this deposition of Richard Gugliada, head of S&P's CDO operations, the government asks why the company was slow to implement updates to its model for evaluating CDOs:
Q: Is it fair to say that Standard & Poor's goal of preserving an increasing market share and profits from ratings fees influence the development of the updates to the CDO evaluator?
A: In part, correct.
Q: The main reason to avoid a reduction in the noninvestment grade ratings business was to preserve S&P's market share in that category, correct?
A: Correct.
Years after the crash, it's a little insulting to see industry analysts blithely copping under oath to having traded science for market share, especially since the companies continue to protest to the contrary in public. Contacted for this story, Moody's and S&P insisted many of the documents in this case were simply taken out of context, and that their analysis throughout has been rigorous, objective and independent.
It's a thin defense, but it's holding – for now. McGraw-Hill stock plunged nearly 14 percent when news of the Justice Department suit leaked, and dropped nearly 19 percent for February, but has since regained much of its value – its stock rose nearly 16 percent in March and April, as markets reacted favorably to, among other things, its recent settlement of the Cheyne and Rhinebridge suits. The markets clearly think the ratings agencies will survive.
What's amazing about this is that even without a mass of ugly documentary evidence proving their incompetence and corruption, these firms ought to be out of business. Even if they just accidentally sucked this badly, that should be enough to persuade the markets to look to a different model, different companies, different ratings methodologies.
But we know now that it was no accident. What happened to the ratings agencies during the financial crisis, and what is likely still happening within their walls, is a phenomenon as old as business itself. Given a choice between money and integrity, they took the money. Which wouldn't be quite so bad if they weren't in the integrity business.
This story is from the July 4 - July 18, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-last-mystery-of-the-financial-crisis-20130619
Peter Schiff: Fed Is Trying to Reflate a Phony Economy (VIDEO)
http://xrepublic.tv/node/3880
Shermann
Maybe....it depends on you. Whether it's living out in the woods or finding a niche within society. The bottom line is can you think for yourself? Why would anyone want to stand in line to see Universal studios when you can visit the Grand Canyon, Alaskan glaciers, the Mammoth Caves, or even the world's biggest ball of yarn, lol....with no waiting?
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/8543
You mean like live in the woods or some farmland somewhere ?
Chris
Another message you could get from the story is that removing yourself as much as possible from such a perverse and unfair society might be the best course. Whether you're a winner or a loser......you're still playing the game.
Kinda weird that at the very end the writer took a shot at Universal Studios. I don't think the poor pay for those VIP passes. I'm pretty sure they cost a small fortune, like good tickets to anything.
But the basic message of the story is that Wall St. and our political system is rigged for the rich -- is very true.
But the other message is -- don't grow up being unskilled or untalented -- or you'll be working at WalMart and applying for food stamps.
Chris
Don't blame it on us!
Fed Chairman Ben Bernocchio did a press conference this afternoon after the release of the Fed statement. He says that the "main headwind" for the economy is "fiscal policy". You know, taxes and spending, budget surpluses and deficits...well not so much surpluses. He basically said "don't blame it on us as we've done all that we possibly can". In human speak, he is putting the blame on Congress. He is saying that if the fiscal house was in order, none of this would ever have happened and the Fed wouldn't have had to drop rates to zero and monetize debt.
Rick Santelli of CNBC earlier this morning asked "what are you so afraid of Ben?". This is a great 3 minutes to watch and if you're like me, it validates the times when I hear idiocy and start screaming at the TV. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-19/rick-santelli-rages-what-bernanke-so-afraid Yes, Congress is to blame for spending more than we took in, I agree. I also believe that without a Fed which creates inflation and thus makes the debt "cheaper" to pay back in the future (which can now never happen) the Congress would never have gone hog wild with spending. They spent and they spent and they spent...because they figured that it would be "cheaper" ...later to pay back. Also, the Treasury could never have borrowed what they have over the last 4 years in particular without the Fed buying (monetizing) the debt. There was no one else left to buy Treasuries...so they bought everything that was offered by Treasury.
By the way, if you look at what was said, "fiscal policy as a headwind" can and should be extrapolated into "we are broke". I say this because it is true and it is reality. If the Fed doesn't continue with QE, the Treasury cannot borrow what they need to borrow. If the Fed stops printing the economy will go into serious reverse and tax revenues will drop, thus putting more pressure on the Treasury to borrow even further. For that matter, were the Fed to stop printing the banking and financial systems would seize up and not even overnight loans would clear.
This is not rocket science, it is merely looking at what is and isn't. The Treasury is broke and the vaults have been looted while our central bank keeps the Ponzi game going by printing "reserve currency" out of thin air so that the banks who sit on huge losses (though not disclosed because of fantasy accounting practices) can keep their doors open.
Please do not be fooled into believing that they have a "solution". They don't because there is not one. If everything was "so good" then why has legislation recently been written on how to raid customer accounts whenever a bank fails? We were on the very edge of total collapse back in 2008-09, nothing was fixed, actually nothing was even changed (except for accounting principles), we continued on with exactly what got us into the problems in the first place...only with much higher doses of bad business logic. Not that he is having fun but Mr. Bernocchio must surely hope that "time" passes quickly so that he can get out of Dodge before the house comes down.
At this point, the only thing he can hope for is "it didn't happen on my watch!".
Regards, Bill H.
http://harveyorgan.blogspot.com/2013/06/fomc-announcement-causes-all-asset.html
Bill Holter - Nice Chart:
Nice chart huh? Once upon a time in an age long long ago the amount of Gold held was equal to or more than the amount of debt owed. It didn't have to be like that, it would have been OK to have more debt than Gold as long as the debt got paid off...eventually...and in a currency that remained relatively constant. This of course did not happen, instead the "payable" currency was debased and debauched and somewhere along the way (probably back to the days of John Connally's "it may be our Dollar but it's YOUR problem" comment) it was decided that the debt would NEVER be paid off.
What has happened year after year is that new (and exponentially more) debt was issued (borrowed) to fund our lifestyle and payoff (roll) old debt principal and interest.
When all of this started years ago..."debt worked" as a gearing mechanism. $1 borrowed would create more than $5 of GDP growth, this is not the case now. Now, $1 borrowed creates less than .50 cents of growth so we have gone from a very positive gearing to actually a negative gearing. Yes I know, "deficits don't matter"...until they do. Just ask the various European countries whether deficits matter or not.
The other part to this "nice chart" is the teeny tiny yellow part. That is the current market value of "our Gold". There is only one problem here, this truly and surely "WAS" our Gold as of 1956 (the last time an audit was done). Is the Gold still there? If it is, then who really owns it? Have we "swapped" it or "leased" it out?
We know for a fact that economic numbers are "massaged" or in plain English bogus and just plain made up. We know that firm after firm pays fines (without admitting guilt) and markets, all markets are rigged to "paint the right picture", are Gold and Silver the ONLY markets not rigged? Is it possible that the U.S. has never sold any Gold to keep the price down and thus prop up the value of the Dollar? No chance, not even in hell.
So you look at this chart and on its own it has become and is very very frightening. The only problem is that the $16.5 trillion worth of debt is really and actually at least $100 trillion when you add in agency debt, off "budget" debt, loan guarantees and future promises. Then you look at the 8,400 tons of Gold and do a little bit of detective work and see that Gold exports have exceeded total mining production every year this century to deduce that "some" (maybe close to ALL) Gold has been dishoarded.
If you reworked this chart with numbers that even resemble reality you get a very ugly picture with only one outcome...we're screwed and have been for years...we just didn't know it!
Regards, Bill H.
http://harveyorgan.blogspot.com/2013/06/fomc-announcement-causes-all-asset.html
Jeff Rense & Michael Collins - Fukushima Radiation In The US (VIDEO)
Gerald Celente - Trends In The News - "The Business Of War" - (6/17/13) (VIDEO)
Long Before Helping Expose NSA Spying, Journalist Laura Poitras Faced Harassment From U.S. Agents (VIDEO)
http://xrepublic.tv/node/3858
Shermann
3 NSA Veterans Speak Out on Whistle-Blower: We Told You So -
See more at: http://www.forbiddenknowledgetv.com/videos/patriot-act/3-nsa-veterans-speak-out-onwhistle-blower-we-told-you-so.html#sthash.NhRiWkNy.dpuf
America Feeds the Rich
The Farm Bill that is expected to pass the U.S. House this week explains income inequality in America.
Leo Gerard
Posted by Portside on June 18, 2013
http://portside.org/2013-06-18/america-feeds-rich#sthash.3k0HFa0f.dpuf
The Republican-sponsored proposal slashes food stamps for poor children and pads farm subsidies for wealthy agri-businessmen.
This comes just a week after Senate Republicans refused to protect the poorest students from doubled college loan interest rates because that required closing tax loopholes that benefit big corporations. It comes just weeks after a new study showed the Walmart heirs, among the richest people in the world, pay their workers so little that taxpayers fork over billions to subsidize Walmart's payroll through programs - like food stamps.
This all violates America's cherished ideal of equal opportunity. Americans strive to achieve believing they have the same chance at success as everyone else and, more importantly, that the egalitarian American system will provide their children with a level playing field on which to attain their full potential. Americans believe their government should maintain that level field. But it does not. Not when poor students are denied access to low-interest college loans while Washington charges Wall Street virtually no interest. Not when the House farm bill feeds the rich and starves the poor.
Republican Congressman Stephen Fincher of Frog Jump, Tenn., is the ugly face of the feed-the-rich public policy. He is a seventh generation millionaire agri-businessman. He raked in $3.5 million in federal farm subsidies from 1999 to 2012. That averages out to $269,000 a year in farm welfare. It makes him one of the largest farm welfare recipients in Tennessee history as well as among members of Congress.
This politician, who thrived on the government dole, raking in $738 a day in farm welfare over the past 13 years, is among the loudest advocates for increasing subsidies to agribusiness by about $10 billion and slashing food stamps by $20 billion.
That would take food from 2 million poor people. They get an average of $133 a month in food stamps. That's less than $5 a day for the poor - not the $738 a day that Fincher got.
Fincher justified taking food out of the mouths of poor people by quoting the Bible, 2 Thessalonians 3:10, to be specific: "For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat."
Citing that verse shows a frightening level of cluelessness. First, Fincher took it out of context. It was intended as an admonishment of those who?d stopped working in anticipation of the Second Coming, not as a castigation of generic non-workers.
Second, 49 percent of those receiving food stamps are children. Would Fincher have five-year-olds work for their supper? How about infants?
Finally, the food stamp program encourages work, and the number of recipients who do tripled in the first decade of the century.
Among the working poor are Walmart employees. Generally, to qualify for food stamps, a family can't earn more than 130 percent of poverty level, which would be $25,000 for a family of three. A typical Walmart worker earning $8.81 an hour, slightly more than minimum wage, receives $15,576 a year.
An analysis by the Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce found that such low wages harm families and burden taxpayers. Government benefit programs - such as food stamps - enable Walmart?s low wage workers to barely scrape by, the report says.
Using data from Wisconsin's Medicaid program, the staff determined that the average Walmart Supercenter there costs taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.7 million each year. That's for programs like Medicaid and food stamps.
The report also notes: "Rising income inequality and wage stagnation threaten the future of America's middle class. While corporate profits break records, the share of national income going to workers' wages has reached record lows."
Walmart provides the perfect example of that. The corporation made $17 billion last year, while paying its workers poverty wages. As Walmart workers use government programs to get by, the six Walmart heirs now have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined. Between 2007 and 2010 the wealth of the six richest Walmart heirs rose from $73 billion to $90 billion while the wealth of the average American declined from $126,000 to $77,000.
This results from government policy. The government doesn?t require Walmart to pay a living wage. Instead, the government uses taxpayer dollars to minimally subsidize low-paid Walmart workers while cutting taxes on the wealthy Walmart heirs.
The government subsidizes Walmart the way it does millionaire famers like Fincher. Though low-income workers receive the food stamps, essentially that government aid is welfare for Walmart. A food stamp applicant must prove poverty to qualify for government aid. But not big business. Not agri-business.
The number of food stamp recipients increased dramatically since 2008 because of the great recession, an event caused by reckless gambling on Wall Street. House Republican policy calls for the victims of the recession to suffer and the perpetrators to continue receiving low interest federal loans.
This policy, this funneling of money to the top, increases inequality and decreases opportunity. A child who goes to school hungry, for example, has a very hard time learning.
Universal Studios is among the corporations that have institutionalized inequity. At its parks, middle-class parents and their children wait for hours for entrance to attractions, but the wealthy and their scions simply cut in line. The children of the wealthy don't have to wait. Universal facilitates this with expensive VIP tickets that entitle rich children to park privileges. The VIP package includes hand sanitizer in case a rich kid accidently touches a "regular Joe" kid, as Universal called them. Also, VIP families get exclusive breakfast and lunch service.
America feeds the rich. Equal opportunity is dead.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya with Ry on Syria and Western Propaganda (VIDEO)
A Must Listen!!!
Why This Gigantic "Intelligence" Apparatus?
Mises Daily: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 by Robert Higgs
[From the Beacon blog of the Independent Institute (2010).]
http://mises.org/daily/4872/Why-This-Gigantic-Intelligence-Apparatus
On July 19, 2010, the Washington Post published the first of three large reports by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the dimensions of the gigantic US apparatus of "intelligence" activities being undertaken to combat terrorist acts against the United States, such as the 9/11 attacks. To say that this activity amounts to mobilizing every police officer in the country to stop street fights in Camden only begins to suggest its almost-unbelievable disproportion to the alleged threat.
Among Priest and Arkin's findings from a two-year study are the following:
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
[We] discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.
Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year — a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
According to retired admiral Dennis C. Blair, formerly the director of national intelligence, after 9/11 "the attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing." I submit that this explanation does not cut to the heart of the matter. As it stands, it suggests a sort of mindless desire to pile mountains of money, technology, and personnel on top of an already-enormous mountain of money, technology, and personnel for no reason other than the vague notion that more must be better. In my view, national politics does not work in that way.
As Priest and Arkin report, "The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 ½ times the size it was on September 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs." Virtually everyone the reporters consulted told them in effect that "the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending." To be sure, they received more than they could spend responsibly, but not more than they were eager to spend irresponsibly. After all, it's not as if they were spending their own money.
"The most plausible reason why so few attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out."
Why would these hundreds of organizations and contracting companies be willing to take gigantic amounts of the taxpayers' money when everyone agrees that the money cannot be spent sensibly and that the system already in place cannot function effectively or efficiently to attain its ostensible purpose? The question answers itself. It's loot for the taking, and there has been no shortage of takers. Indeed, these stationary bandits continue to demand more money each year.
And for what? The announced goal is to identify terrorists and eliminate them or prevent them from carrying out their nefarious acts. This is simultaneously a small task and an impossible one.
It is small because the number of persons seeking to carry out a terrorist act of substantial consequence against the United States and in a position to do so cannot be more than a handful. If the number were greater, we would have seen many more attacks or attempted attacks during the past decade — after all, the number of possible targets is virtually unlimited, and the attackers might cause some form of damage in countless ways. The most plausible reason why so few attacks or attempted attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out. (I refer to genuine attempts, not to the phony-baloney schemes planted in the minds of simpletons by government undercover agents and then trumpeted to the heavens when the FBI "captures" the unfortunate victims of the government's entrapment.)
So the true dimension of the terrorism problem that forms the excuse for these hundreds of programs of official predation against the taxpayers is small — not even in the same class with, say, reducing automobile-accident or household-accident deaths by 20 percent.
Yet, at the same time, the antiterrorism task is impossible because terrorism is a simple act available in some form to practically any determined adult with access to Americans and their property at home or abroad. It is simply not possible to stop all acts of terrorism if potential terrorists have been given a sufficient grievance to motivate their wreaking some form of havoc against Americans. However, it is silly to make the prevention of all terrorist acts the goal. What can't be done won't be done, regardless of how many people and how much money one devotes to doing it. We can, though, endure some losses from terrorism in the same way that we routinely endure some losses from accidents, diseases, and ordinary crime.
The sheer idiocy of paying legions of twenty-something grads of Harvard and Yale — youngsters who cannot speak Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, or any of the other languages of the areas they purport to be analyzing and who know practically nothing of the history, customs, folkways, and traditions of these places — indicates that no one seriously expects the promised payoff in intelligence to emerge from the effort. The whole business is akin to sending a blind person to find a needle inside a maze buried somewhere in a hillside.
That the massive effort is utterly uncoordinated and scarcely able to communicate one part's "findings" to another only strengthens the conclusion that the goal is not stopping terrorism, but getting the taxpayers' money and putting it into privileged pockets. Even if the expected damage from acts of terrorism against the United States were $10 billion per year, which seems much too high a guess, it makes no sense to spend more than $75 billion every year to prevent it — and it certainly makes no sense to spend any money only pretending to prevent it.
What we see here is not really an "intelligence" or counterterrorism operation at all. It's a rip-off, plain and simple, fed by irrational fear and continually stoked by the government plunderers who are exercising the power and raking in the booty to "fight terrorism."
Glenn Greenwald: The Favorite Tactic Is To Demonize A Whistleblower 06/16/2013 (VIDEO)
Just Some More Info!!!
http://xrepublic.tv/node/3816
Shermann
Me too...one of my favs also.
Glenn Greenwald Vs. Lawrence O’Donnell (MSNBC) – A Commentary
http://libertycrier.com/government/glenn-greenwald-vs-lawrence-odonnell-msnbc-a-commentary/?utm_source=The+Liberty+Crier&utm_campaign=a29195c9f2-The_Liberty_Crier_Daily_News_6_16_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_600843dec4-a29195c9f2-284729081
Shermann
This is a great interview...When all else fails, they take us to war...
Shermann
Something to be decided in the United Nations?
War is merely the catastrophic effect of our daily living, and so long as we do not change our daily living, no amount of legislation, controls, and sanctions will prevent war. Is peace in the mind and heart, in the way of our life, or is it merely a governmental regulation, something to be decided in the United Nations? I am afraid that for most of us, peace is only a matter of legislation, and we are not concerned with peace in our own minds and hearts; therefore, there can be no peace in the world. You cannot have peace, inward or outward, so long as you are ambitious, competitive, so long as you regard yourself as a German, a Hindu, a Russian, or an Englishman, so long as you are striving to become somebody in this mad world. Peace comes only when you understand all this and are no longer pursuing success in a society which is already corrupt. Only the peaceful mind, the mind that understands itself, can bring peace in the world.
Krtishnamurti - Hamburg 1956,Talk 1
Where is the Skepticism About Chemical Weapons?
The media’s lack of skepticism about White House claims
Patrick Cockburn
Democracy Now!
June 14, 2013
Patrick Cockburn
The Independent
Patrick Cockburn on U.S. Plans to Arm Syrian Rebels: Where is the Skepticism About Chemical Weapons?
Veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn of The Independent joins us to discuss the Obama administration’s decision to begin directly arming Syrian rebels after concluding the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons. "There must be some doubts about this," Cockburn says, adding that it "reminds me of what they were saying in 2002 and 2003 about Saddam [Hussein]’s weapons of mass destruction." Cockburn warns U.S. involvement could escalate regional conflicts that could "go on for years," and critiques the media’s lack of skepticism about White House claims.
JUAN GONZALEZ: We begin the news that the Obama administration has decided to begin arming Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad after concluding Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons. The White House said Thursday it has firmer evidence the Assad government has used the weapons multiple times on a "small scale" and that up 150 people have died. Unnamed officials told the Times the CIA would coordinate the transfers of small arms and ammunition. The United Nations says roughly 93,000 people have died in the two-year-old civil war.AMY GOODMAN: A U.N. panel recently accused both sides of carrying out war crimes. In a conference phone call with reporters Thursday, U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes declined to say exactly what type of aid the U.S. would give the rebels’ Supreme Military Council.
BEN RHODES: The president has made a decision about providing more support to the opposition. That will involve providing direct support to the SMC. That includes military support. I cannot detail for you all of the types of that support, for a variety of reasons, but, again, suffice to say this is going to be different in both scope and scale in terms of what we are providing to the SMC than what we have provided before.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined on the telephone by Patrick Cockburn, foreign correspondent for The Independent of London who has reported extensively on Syria.
Your response to what the United States is saying and going to do in Syria, Patrick?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, I think it’s probably bad news for the Syrian people. It means there’s going to be an escalation of the war. What isn’t clear yet is whether the administration, as it hints, is going to just trying to redress the balance between the rebels and Assad’s forces, after the rebels have suffered some defeat, or whether they’re going right down the road to try and overthrow Assad, rather like Libya in 2011, and this is the beginning of an all-out offensive against Assad, which will grow incrementally.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Patrick Cockburn, the potential here for the United States intervening not only in the situation in Syria but also in the growing sort of divide and conflict between Shia and Sunni throughout that region of the world?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Yeah, so this is extraordinarily dangerous. I mean, the—what’s happening in Syria may have begun as an uprising against a dictatorial government, but now it’s Sunni against Shia within the country, it’s Sunni against Shia outside the country. The allies of the U.S. in this conflict are extremely sectarian Sunni monarchies, very little interest in democracy. So, I think once you get entangled in this, rather like Iraq, it’s very different to—difficult to disentangle yourself, and this could go on for years.
AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Cockburn, the evidence that the U.S. says it has that the Assad forces used chemical weapons?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, there must be, you know, some doubts about this. You know, they say this in a sure voice, but it’s a sure voice which reminds me of what they were saying in 2002 and 2003 about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. You know, you would need the evidence to be laid out in front of you to really be convinced by this.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And the concerns in some circles that this is really developing into a proxy war with Iran and Hezbollah, rather than actually trying to deal with the situation internally within Syria?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Yeah, it already has turned into a proxy war. You can see that with—Hezbollah and Iran were involved, but also the U.S. was—had already combined with Qatar to send weapons. Qatar has sent up to $3 billion to the rebels, 70 loads of flights of weapons, organized by—with the CIA. So, that was already happening. I think one of the—you know, what ought to happen would be to go down the diplomatic road to try and have a ceasefire. I don’t think you can have any solution at this moment in time, because you people are too involved in the war, they hate each other. But they should push for a ceasefire, and then there might be the basis for some talks afterwards. But the decision by the U.S. looks as though it’s going to push this into an all-out and long-running conflict.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Patrick Cockburn, your assessment of the media coverage of what’s happening in Syria and the U.S.’s decision?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, I was rather amazed and depressed by some of it that I have seen, particularly CNN, that was an—seemed to be an immediate acceptance that whatever was said about Syria employing chemical weapons was accepted as if it was written in stone, despite all of what happened in Iraq in the past, and an almost total lack of skepticism about the claims now being made.
AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Cockburn, I want to thank you for being with us—of course, we’ll continue to follow what’s happening in Syria—foreign correspondent for The Independent, speaking to us from London. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll speak with James Bamford about the NSA’s secret war. Stay with us.
Creative Commons License The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
- See more at: http://portside.org/2013-06-15/where-skepticism-about-chemical-weapons#sthash.GGrT1AX7.dpuf
Just the Tip of the Iceberg
Addressing many of the issues arising from last week's NSA stories
Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian (UK)
June 14, 2013
http://portside.org/2013-06-15/just-tip-iceberg
I haven't been able to write this week here because I've been participating in the debate over the fallout from last week's NSA stories, and because we are very busy working on and writing the next series of stories that will begin appearing very shortly. I did, though, want to note a few points, and particularly highlight what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA officials on the agency's previously secret surveillance activities:
"What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today. . . . I can't speak to what we learned in there, and I don't know if there are other leaks, if there's more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it's the tip of the iceberg . . . . I think it's just broader than most people even realize, and I think that's, in one way, what astounded most of us, too."
The Congresswoman is absolutely right: what we have reported thus far is merely "the tip of the iceberg" of what the NSA is doing in spying on Americans and the world. She's also right that when it comes to NSA spying, "there is significantly more than what is out in the media today", and that's exactly what we're working to rectify.
But just consider what she's saying: as a member of Congress, she had no idea how invasive and vast the NSA's surveillance activities are. Sen. Jon Tester, who is a member of the Homeland Security Committee, said the same thing, telling MSNBC about the disclosures that "I don't see how that compromises the security of this country whatsoever" and adding: "quite frankly, it helps people like me become aware of a situation that I wasn't aware of before because I don't sit on that Intelligence Committee."
How can anyone think that it's remotely healthy in a democracy to have the NSA building a massive spying apparatus about which even members of Congress, including Senators on the Homeland Security Committee, are totally ignorant and find "astounding" when they learn of them? How can anyone claim with a straight face that there is robust oversight when even members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are so constrained in their ability to act that they are reduced to issuing vague, impotent warnings to the public about what they call radical "secret law" enabling domestic spying that would "stun" Americans to learn about it, but are barred to disclose what it is they're so alarmed by? Put another way, how can anyone contest the value and justifiability of the stories that we were able to publish as a result of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing: stories that informed the American public - including even the US Congress - about these incredibly consequential programs? What kind of person would think that it would be preferable to remain in the dark - totally ignorant - about them?
I have a column in the Guardian's newspaper edition tomorrow examining the fallout from these stories. That will be posted here and I won't repeat that now. I will, though, note the following brief items:
(1) Much of US politics, and most of the pundit reaction to the NSA stories, are summarized by this one single visual from Pew:
The most vocal media critics of our NSA reporting, and the most vehement defenders of NSA surveillance, have been, by far, Democratic (especially Obama-loyal) pundits. As I've written many times, one of the most significant aspects of the Obama legacy has been the transformation of Democrats from pretend-opponents of the Bush War on Terror and National Security State into their biggest proponents: exactly what the CIA presciently and excitedly predicted in 2008 would happen with Obama's election.
Some Democrats have tried to distinguish 2006 from 2013 by claiming that the former involved illegal spying while the latter does not. But the claim that current NSA spying is legal is dubious in the extreme: the Obama DOJ has repeatedly thwarted efforts by the ACLU, EFF and others to obtain judicial rulings on their legality and constitutionality by invoking procedural claims of secrecy, immunity and standing. If Democrats are so sure these spying programs are legal, why has the Obama DOJ been so eager to block courts from adjudicating that question?
More to the point, Democratic critiques of Bush's spying were about more than just legality. I know that because I actively participated in the campaign to amplify those critiques. Indeed, by 2006, most of Bush's spying programs - definitely his bulk collection of phone records - were already being conducted under the supervision and with the blessing of the FISA court. Moreover, leading members of Congress - including Nancy Pelosi - were repeatedly briefed on all aspects of Bush's NSA spying program. So the distinctions Democrats are seeking to draw are mostly illusory.
To see how that this is so, just listen to then-Senator Joe Biden in 2006 attack the NSA for collecting phone records: he does criticize the program for lacking FISA court supervision (which wasn't actually true), but also claims to be alarmed by just how invasive and privacy-destroying that sort of bulk record collection is. He says he "doesn't think" that the program passes the Fourth Amendment test: how can Bush's bulk record collection program be unconstitutional while Obama's program is constitutional? But Biden also rejected Bush's defense (exactly the argument Obama is making now) - that "we're not listening to the phone calls, we're just looking for patterns" - by saying this:
I don't have to listen to your phone calls to know what you're doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I'm able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. . . . If it's true that 200 million Americans' phone calls were monitored - in terms of not listening to what they said, but to whom they spoke and who spoke to them - I don't know, the Congress should investigative this."
Is collecting everyone's phone records not "very intrusive" when Democrats are doing it? Just listen to that short segment to see how every defense Obama defenders are making now were the ones Bush defenders made back then. Again, leading members of Congress and the FISA court were both briefed on and participants in the Bush telephone record collection program as well, yet Joe Biden and most Democrats found those programs very alarming and "very intrusive" back then.
(2) Notwithstanding the partisan-driven Democratic support for these programs, and notwithstanding the sustained demonization campaign aimed at Edward Snowden from official Washington, polling data, though mixed, has thus far been surprisingly encouraging.
A Time Magazine poll found that 54% of Americans believe Snowden did "a good thing", while only 30% disagreed. That approval rating is higher than the one enjoyed by both Congress and President Obama. While a majority think he should be nonetheless prosecuted, a plurality of young Americans, who overwhelmingly view Snowden favorably, do not even want to see him charged. Reuters found that more Americans see Snowden as a "patriot" than a "traitor". A Gallup poll this week found that more Americans disapprove (53%) than approve (37%) of the two NSA spying programs revealed last week by the Guardian.
(3) Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the Obama DOJ, writes in the Guardian that as a long-time NSA official, he saw all of the same things at the NSA that Edward Snowden is now warning Americans about. Drake calls Snowden's acts "an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience." William Binney, the mathematician who resigned after a 30-year career as a senior NSA official in protest of post-9/11 domestic surveillance, said on Democracy Now this week that Snowden's claims about the NSA are absolutely true.
Meanwhile, Daniel Ellsberg, writing in the Guardian, wrote that "there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago." He added: "Snowden did what he did because he recognized the NSA's surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity."
Listen to actual experts and patriots - people who have spent their careers inside the NSA and/or who risked their liberty for the good of the country - and the truth of Snowden's claims and the justifiability of his acts become manifest.
(4) As we were about to begin publishing these NSA stories, a veteran journalist friend warned me that the tactic used by Democratic partisans would be to cling to and then endlessly harp on any alleged inaccuracy in any one of the stories we publish as a means of distracting attention away from the revelations and discrediting the entire project. That proved quite prescient, as that is exactly what they are attempting to do.
Thus far we have revealed four independent programs: the bulk collection of telephone records, the Prism program, Obama's implementation of an aggressive foreign and domestic cyber-operations policy, and false claims by NSA officials to Congress. Every one of those articles was vetted by multiple Guardian editors and journalists - not just me. Democratic partisans have raised questions about only one of the stories - the only one that happened to be also published by the Washington Post (and presumably vetted by multiple Post editors and journalists) - in order to claim that an alleged inaccuracy in it means our journalism in general is discredited.
They are wrong. Our story was not inaccurate. The Washington Post revised parts of its article, but its reporter, Bart Gellman, stands by its core claims ("From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for Prism access may 'task' the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company's staff").
The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That's because we did not claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers was true; we reported - accurately - that the NSA document claims that the program allows direct collection from the companies' servers. Before publishing, we went to the internet companies named in the documents and asked about these claims. When they denied it, we purposely presented the story as one of a major discrepancy between what the NSA document claims and what the internet companies claim, as the headline itself makes indisputably clear:
The NSA document says exactly what we reported. Just read it and judge for yourself (Prism is "collection directly from the servers of these US service providers"). It's endearingly naive how some people seem to think that because government officials or corporate executives issue carefully crafted denials, this resolves the matter. Read the ACLU's tech expert, Chris Soghoian, explain why the tech companies' denials are far less significant and far more semantic than many are claiming.
Nor do these denials make any sense. If all the tech companies are doing under Prism is providing what they've always provided to the NSA, but simply doing it by a different technological means, then why would a new program be necessary at all? How can NSA officials claim that a program that does nothing more than change the means for how this data is delivered is vital in stopping terrorist threats? Why does the NSA document hail the program as one that enables new forms of collection? Why would it be "top secret" if all this was were just some new way of transmitting court-ordered data? How is Prism any different in any meaningful way from how the relationship between the companies and the NSA has always functioned?
As a follow-up to our article, the New York Times reported on extensive secret negotiations between Silicon Valley executives and NSA officials over government access to the companies' data. It's precisely because these arrangements are secret and murky yet incredibly significant that we published our story about these conflicting claims. They ought to be resolved in public, not in secret. The public should know exactly what access the NSA is trying to obtain to the data of these companies, and should know exactly what access these companies are providing. Self-serving, unchecked, lawyer-vetted denials by these companies don't remotely resolve these questions.
In a Nation post yesterday, Rick Perlstein falsely accuses me of not having addressed the questions about the Prism story. I've done at least half-a-dozen television shows in the last week where I was asked about exactly those questions and answered fully with exactly what I've written here (see this appearance with Chris Hayes as just the latest example); the fact that Perlstein couldn't be bothered to use Google doesn't entitle him to falsely claim I haven't addressed these questions. I have done so repeatedly, and do so here again.
I know that many Democrats want to cling to the belief that, in Perlstein's words, "the powers that be will find it very easy to seize on this one error to discredit [my] NSA revelation, even the ones he nailed dead to rights". Perlstein cleverly writes that "such distraction campaigns are how power does its dirtiest work" as he promotes exactly that campaign.
But that won't happen. The documents and revelations are too powerful. The story isn't me, or Edward Snowden, or the eagerness of Democratic partisans to defend the NSA as a means of defending President Obama, and try as they might, Democrats won't succeed in making the story be any of those things. The story is the worldwide surveillance apparatus the NSA is constructing in the dark and the way that has grown under Obama, and that's where my focus is going to remain.
(5) NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen examines complaints that my having strong, candidly acknowledged opinions on surveillance policies somehow means that the journalism I do on those issues is suspect. It is very worth reading what he has to say on this topic as it gets to the heart about several core myths about what journalism is.
(6) Last week, prior to the revelation of our source's identity, I wrote that "ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office, the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message" and "that attempt will undoubtedly be made here."
The predictable personality assaults on Snowden have begun in full force from official Washington and their media spokespeople. They are only going to intensify. There is nobody who political officials and their supine media class hate more than those who meaningfully dissent from their institutional orthodoxies and shine light on what they do. The hatred for such individuals is boundless.
There are two great columns on this dynamic. This one by Reuters' Jack Shafer explores how elite Washington reveres powerful leakers that glorify political officials, but only hate marginalized and powerless leakers who discredit Washington and its institutions. And perhaps the best column yet on Snowden comes this morning from the Daily Beast's Kirsten Powers: just please take the time to read it all, as it really conveys the political and psychological rot that is driving the attacks on him and on his very carefully vetted disclosures.
UPDATE
The New York Times reports today that Yahoo went to court in order to vehemently resist the NSA's directive that they join the Prism program, and joined only when the court compelled it to do so. The company specifically "argued that the order violated its users' Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures."
If, as NSA (and Silicon Valley) defenders claim, Prism is nothing more than a harmless little drop-box mechanism for delivering to the government what these companies were already providing, why would Yahoo possibly be in court so vigorously resisting it and arguing that it violates their users' Fourth Amendment rights? Similarly, how could it possibly be said - as US government officials have - that Prism has been instrumental in stopping terrorist plots if it did not enhance the NSA's collection capabilities? The denials from the internet companies make little sense when compared to what we know about the program. At the very least, there is ample reason to demand more disclosure and transparency about exactly what this is and what data-access arrangements they have agreed to.
UPDATE II
My column that is appearing in the Guardian newspaper, on the fallout from the NSA stories, is now posted here.
UPDATE III
Underscoring all of these points, please take two minutes to watch this amazing video, courtesy of EFF, in which the 2006 version of Joe Biden aggressively debates the 2013 version of Barack Obama on whether the US government should be engaged in the bulk collection of American's phone records:
That's the kind of debate we need more of.
Stunning Images From China - 10,000 People Waiting In Line To Buy Gold -
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/14/2013 12:38 -0400
Sometimes one must see to believe, in this case believe just how massive the raw demand for the shiny, barbarous relic is in China during times of relative monetary stability (in this case the Dragon Boat Festival).
Now assume runaway inflation as we saw in 2011 China, which may be unleashed by something as catalytic as the PBOC once again deciding to inject liquidity in its suffocating banking system and to revive growth in the stalling economy.
June 11, ten thousand people line up in front of a gold shop to buy gold. The buyers lined up during the three day Dragon Boat Festival.
Source Caixin.
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2013/06/Gold%20Line%204.jpg
There Is NO Threat To America When I Talk To My Mother! - Alan Grayson
Alan Grayson is a Favorite of Mine!!! Glad to See him Back in Office!!!
http://xrepublic.tv/node/3755
Shermann
"You Wanna Change The Whole Mood Of This Country Have A Couple Terrorist Attacks!" VIDEO)
http://xrepublic.tv/node/3761
Shermann
Senators skip classified briefing on NSA snooping to catch flights home
Not That This is a Hot Topic or Anything These Days!!!
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/305765-senators-skip-classified-briefing-on-nsa-snooping-to-catch-flights-home
Shermann
BULLSHIT ALERT!! US says Syria may have used chemical weapons
That would be an interesting sight.........
Excellent breakdown of the myth of politics.
Just goes to prove NeoCons and NeoLibs are dickless.
Get everyone to use DMT in a shamanistic setting and watch results.
DMT should be made in aerosol form for riot police.
The great mother wouldn't let them do harm to others...
LOL!
Your Hormones Tell You How To Vote
The scientific search is on for the chemical cocktail that makes you vote Republican (or Democrat)
.
—By Chris Mooney | Fri Jun. 14, 2013 3:05 AM PDT
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/how-hormones-influence-our-political-opinions
Today we're witnessing an explosion of research on the biological factors that may underlie our political views. This new body of science is, slowly but surely, upending the old "I vote Democrat because Mom and Dad did" view of where our ideologies come from, and substituting an explanation based on genes, personalities, and emotions.
But to draw a seamless connection between a person's genes and his or her political orientation poses a formidable scientific challenge. What's more, there's a crucial biological step that, thus far, has been largely missing. Genes, after all, are simply the code or template that our cells use to make proteins. So what are those proteins doing in the body to create political leanings?
Today's political psychologists and biologists are homing in on a possible answer: Genetic differences may influence the body's production of hormones (such as testosterone) and neurotransmitters (such as dopamine). These chemical messengers flow through the bloodstream and in between nerve cells, shaping our patterns of attention, response, emotions, and much else. Such patterns, the thinking goes, then come together to create our values and personalities; and these, along with input from our surroundings, impel our political ideologies and behaviors.
"Those people who don't vote are the people who tend to have fairly high cortisol levels. Because politics is pretty stressful."
"The variation between people in hormone levels is just tremendous, and I don't think we really appreciate that," explains John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who has been a pioneer in studying the biology of ideology.
This is a very new field, but already researchers have homed in on some hormones and neurotransmitters that may be involved in politics:
Cortisol: This stress hormone may also influence us politically, according to recent research by Hibbing and his collaborators. "You can see people's cortisol levels go up dramatically when you stress them out," Hibbing says—for instance, by requiring them to prepare to give a speech that is going to be videotaped. "We are finding there are relationships between cortisol and not voting. Those people who don't vote are the people who tend to have fairly high cortisol levels. Because politics is pretty stressful."
Testosterone. "There is genetic variance in how much testosterone someone has at birth, and there are certain things that can enhance or diminish that," explains Brown University political scientist Rose McDermott, a prominent researcher on the science of ideology who authored a recent book chapter on hormones and politics. "One of those things that enhance that is muscle mass—if you build muscle mass, you enhance" your testosterone levels.
What might this have to do with politics? While direct research linking testosterone to ideology is lacking, researchers have recently published data tying muscle mass to political preferences. One study shows that rich men with large biceps are more opposed to wealth redistribution than rich men with small biceps. Another study finds that weightlifting ability correlates with support for, er, a more muscular foreign policy. Plus, get this: Men with wider faces (an indicator of testosterone levels) have been found to be more willing to outwardly express prejudicial beliefs than their thin-faced counterparts.
Oxytocin: Often dubbed the "love hormone" because of its role in forging ties between lovers (and parents and children), oxytocin may also have a role in politics. Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist at Claremont Graduate University, describes research in which a nasal spray containing oxytocin made research subjects more generous in sharing money to with one another. But before you jump to the conclusion that oxytocin simply fuels generosity, consider another study, in which the hormone seemed to promote cooperation with your in-group or tribe, but quite the opposite with an outside group or tribe that threatens you. Clearly there are strong political implications here—and not entirely cuddly ones.
Dopamine: This neurotransmitter shapes our need for pleasure, rewards, and novel sensations. Indeed, "sensation seeking" has been associated with particular dopamine receptors in the brain whose numbers vary, for genetic reasons, from individual to individual. A particular variant of the gene that codes for these receptors has, in turn, been associated with political liberalism; one study found that people who had the key gene variant in question were more likely to be political liberals.
None of which is to say that researchers can definitively say how any of the four chemicals discussed here—cortisol, testosterone, oxytocin, and dopamine—may affect us politically. Nor are they the only candidate hormones or neurotransmitters that may do so. "I think it would be a mistake to kind of lead people to believe that in the near future this is going to be tied up with a ribbon," says Hibbing.
For Hibbing that's good news, because studying political hormones could help lay to rest the concern that the new biology-of-politics research is focused on simplistic genetic explanations for why we think as we do. "It moves us a little bit away from the nature-nurture debate, because clearly, the nature of your endocrine system and how it's released, it's influenced by genetics, but also by your experiences in your early life," he says. Our hormones pulse and cascade, in part, in response to what happens to us—and what has happened to us. And over time, a pattern of response can be laid down. Nobody disputes that—but what scientists are now saying is that the pattern itself may influence our political leanings.
Russia’s President Putin talks NSA, Syria, Iran, drones in exclusive RT interview (FULL VIDEO)
It Appears that Putin Knows our Constitution Better than we Do..
http://www.thelonestarwatchdog.com/russias-president-putin-talks-nsa-syria-iran-drones-in-exclusive-rt-interview-full-video.html
Shermann
Ben Swann Naming Names In IRS Scandal On Hannity (VIDEO)
http://libertycrier.com/government/ben-swann-naming-names-in-irs-scandal-on-hannity/?utm_source=The+Liberty+Crier&utm_campaign=e1af2f3706-The_Liberty_Crier_Daily_News_6_13_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_600843dec4-e1af2f3706-284729081
Shermann
Federal Surveillance: The Threat to Americans' Security
(From the Vault)
More Information Equals More Power
JANUARY 01, 2004 by JAMES BOVARD
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/federal-surveillance-the-threat-to-americans-security#axzz2W0qXPoov
Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11 the Bush administration has launched many new surveillance programs in the name of homeland security. When critics raised questions about the potential abuses of the new powers, some administration supporters insisted that Bush’s new surveillance policies were benign because there was no evidence the programs were being abused.
But the key to understanding new government intrusions is that horror stories do not surface in the first 72 hours after a new power is granted. The machinery of government takes time to deploy and expand. It takes time for the impact of precedents to expand, for the agents all along the line to get the message that they are not entitled to go much further than before. We must look to history to see what is likely to happen once the government is unleashed.
In May 2002, after revelations that the FBI missed many warning signs before 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he was effectively abolishing restrictions on FBI surveillance of Americans’ everyday life. Those restrictions were first imposed in 1976 after pervasive FBI abuses were revealed. At that time, Attorney General Edward Levi announced guidelines to curtail FBI agents’ intrusions into the lives of Americans who were not criminal suspects.
At his May 30 announcement Ashcroft declared that, after 9/11, “we in the leadership of the FBI and the Department of Justice began a concerted effort to free the field agents—the brave men and women on the front lines—from the bureaucratic, organizational, and operational restrictions and structures that hindered them from doing their jobs effectively.”1 He complained that in the past FBI agents were required “to blind themselves to information that everyone else [was] free to see.”
However, as the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington non-profit organization, noted, “The FBI was never prohibited in the past from going to mosques, political rallies and other public places, to observe and record what was said, but in the past it had to be guided by the criminal nexus—in deciding what mosques to go to and what political meetings to record, it had to have some reason to believe that terrorism might be discussed.”2 A New York Times editorial warned that the new guidelines “could mean that F.B.I. agents will show up at the doors of people who order politically unpopular books on Amazon.com or make phone calls to organizations critical of the government.”3
Ashcroft’s announcement concluded with the mandatory invocation of freedom consecrating each Bush power grab: “These guidelines will also be a resource to inform the American public and demonstrate that we seek to protect life and liberty from terrorism and other criminal violence with a scrupulous respect for civil rights and personal freedoms. The campaign against terrorism is a campaign to affirm the values of freedom and human dignity. . . . Called to the service of our nation, we are called to the defense of liberty for all men and women.” When Bush was asked about the new FBI guidelines at a photo opportunity that same day, he declared, “the initiative that the attorney general will be outlining today will guarantee our Constitution.”4
Ashcroft talked as if the old guidelines on FBI surveillance were simply the result of a long-ago outbreak of temporary insanity among liberals. Ashcroft declared: “In its 94-year history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been . . . the tireless protector of civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans.”5
The 1976 guidelines were put in place in response to a report by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations that detailed many FBI abuses over the preceding decades. For 15 years, from 1956 to 1971, the FBI ran COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Programs) to actively subvert groups and people that the FBI considered threats to national security or to the established political and social order. Over 2,300 separate operations were carried out to incite street warfare between violent groups, to wreck marriages, to get people fired, to smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants, to sic the IRS on people, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, or other organizations.6 The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”7
Burglary Exposes Scandal
Throughout the COINTELPRO period, presidents, congressmen, and other high-ranking federal officials assured Americans that the federal government was obeying the law and upholding the Constitution. It took a burglary of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, to break the biggest scandal in the history of federal law enforcement. After hundreds of pages of confidential records were commandeered, the “Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI” began passing out the incriminating documents to the media.8 The shocking material sparked congressional and news investigations that eventually (temporarily) shattered the FBI’s legendary ability to control its own image.
The 1976 Senate report noted that COINTELPRO’s origins “are rooted in the Bureau’s jurisdiction to investigate hostile foreign intelligence activities on American soil” and that the FBI used the “techniques of wartime.” William Sullivan, former assistant to the FBI director, declared, “No holds were barred. . . . We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents. . . . [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate.”9
The FBI sought to subvert many black civil-rights organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Deacons for Defense and Justice, and Congress of Racial Equality. FBI headquarters ordered field offices to, as the Senate report noted, “exploit conflicts within and between groups; to use news media contacts to disrupt, ridicule, or discredit groups; to preclude ‘violence-prone’ or ‘rabble rouser’ leaders of these groups from spreading their philosophy publicly; and to gather information on the ‘unsavory backgrounds’—immorality, subversive activity, and criminal activity—of group members.” FBI agents were also ordered to develop specific tactics to “prevent these groups from recruiting young people.”10
Almost any black organization could be targeted for wiretaps. One black leader was monitored largely because he had “recommended the possession of firearms by members for their self-protection.”11 At that time, some southern police departments and sheriffs were notorious for attacking blacks who stood up for their civil rights.12
The FBI office in San Diego instigated violence between the local Black Panthers and a rival black organization, US (United Slaves Inc.).13 Agents sent forged letters making accusations and threats to the groups purportedly from their rivals, along with crude cartoons and drawings meant to enrage the recipients. Three Black Panthers and one member of the rival group were killed during the time the FBI was fanning the flames. A few days after shootings in which two Panthers were wounded and one was killed, and in which the U.S. headquarters was bombed, the FBI office reported to headquarters: “Efforts are being made to determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of the Counterintelligence Program.”
The FBI office bragged shortly thereafter: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this overall situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program.”14
The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued after COINTELPRO and that had 7,402 informants, including proprietors of candy stores and barbershops, as of September 1972. The informants served as “listening posts” “to identify extremists passing through or locating in the ghetto area, to identify purveyors of extremist literature,” and to keep an eye on “Afro-American type bookstores” (including obtaining the names of the bookstores’ “clientele”). The informants’ reports were stockpiled in the FBI’s Racial Intelligence Unit.15
King Targeted
For most of the last five years of his life Martin Luther King was “the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ‘neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader,” the Senate report noted. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington in August 1963 was described by the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division as evidence that King had become “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” King’s home and office were wiretapped and, on 16 occasions, the FBI placed wiretaps in King’s motel rooms, seeking information on the “private activities of King and his advisers” to use to “completely discredit” them.
The FBI sent a copy of one tape recording directly to King along with a note “which Dr. King and his advisers interpreted as a threat to release the tape recording unless Dr. King committed suicide,” the Senate report noted. The FBI offered to play tapes from the hotel rooms for “friendly” reporters. It also sought to block the publication of articles that praised King. An FBI agent intervened with Francis Cardinal Spellman to seek to block a meeting between King and the pope.16
FBI informants also “set up a Klan organization intended to attract membership away from the United Klans of America. The Bureau paid the informants’ personal expenses in setting up the new organization, which had, at its height, 250 members.” During the six years Gary Rowe spent as an FBI informant with the Klan, he, along with other Klansmen, had “beaten people severely, had boarded buses and kicked people off; had went [sic] in restaurants and beaten them with blackjacks, chains, pistols.” Rowe testified how he and other Klansmen used “baseball bats, clubs, chains, and pistols” to attack Freedom Riders.17
The FBI continually expanded its racial-surveillance investigations, eventually targeting white people who were “known to sponsor demonstrations against integration and against the busing of Negro students to white schools.” The FBI also created a national “Rabble Rouser” Index, a “major intelligence program . . . to identify ‘demagogues.’”18
From 1967 to 1972 the FBI paid Howard Berry Godfrey to be an informant with a right-wing paramilitary group in the San Diego area known as the Secret Army. The Senate committee discovered that Godfrey or the Secret Army was involved in “firebombing, smashing windows . . . propelling lug nuts through windows with sling shots, and breaking and entering.” Godfrey took a Secret Army colleague with him to conduct surveillance of the home of a left-wing San Diego State University professor; the colleague fired several shots into the home, badly wounding a woman inside. The Senate report noted “even this shooting incident did not immediately terminate Godfrey as an [FBI] informant.” Godfrey subsequently sold explosive material to a subordinate in the Secret Army who bombed the Guild Theater in San Diego in 1972.19
One FBI informant infiltrated an antiwar group and helped it break into the Camden, New Jersey, Draft Board in 1970. The informant later testified: “Everything they learned about breaking into a building or climbing a wall or cutting glass or destroying lockers, I taught them. I taught them how to cut the glass, how to drill holes in the glass so you cannot hear it and stuff like that, and the FBI supplied me with the equipment needed. The stuff I did not have, the [FBI] got off their own agents.”20 That sting led to a press conference in which J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell proudly announced the indictment of 20 people on an array of charges. After learning of the FBI’s role in the crime, a jury refused to convict any of the defendants.
Some COINTELPRO operations targeted the spouses of political activists, sending them letters asserting that their mates were unfaithful. “Anonymous letters were sent to, among others, a Klansman’s wife, informing her that her husband had ‘taken the flesh of another unto himself,’ the other person being a woman named Ruby, with her ‘lust filled eyes and smart aleck figure’; and to a ‘Black Nationalist’s’ wife saying that her husband ‘been maken it here’ with other women in his organization ‘and that he gives us this jive bout their better in bed then you.’”21
One FBI field office bragged that one such letter to a black activist’s wife produced the “tangible result” and “certainly contributed very strongly” to the marriage’s demise. The FBI targeted the women’s liberation movement, resulting in “intensive reporting on the identities and opinions of women who attended” women’s lib meetings. One FBI informant reported to headquarters of a meeting in New York: “Each woman at this meeting stated why she had come to the meeting and how she felt oppressed, sexually or otherwise. . . . They are mostly against marriage, children, and other states of oppression caused by men.” Women’s lib informants were instructed to “go to meetings, write up reports . . . to try to identify the background of every person there . . . [and] who they were sleeping with.” The Senate report noted that “the intensive FBI investigation of the Women’s Liberation Movement was predicated on the theory that the activities of women in that Movement might lead to demonstrations and violence.”22
The Senate report also described the “snitch jacket” technique—neutralizing a target by labeling him a “snitch” or informant so that he would no longer be trusted—which was used in all COINTELPRO operations. The methods ranged from having an authentic informant start a rumor about the target member, to anonymous letters or phone calls, to faked informants’ reports. . . . The “snitch jacket” is a particularly nasty technique even when used in peaceful groups. It gains an added dimension of danger when it is used—as, indeed, it was—in groups known to have murdered informers.23
Shotgun Approach
The FBI took a shotgun approach toward protesters partly because of its “belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of an act which might be criminal.” Some FBI agents may have viewed dissident speech or protests as a “gateway drug” to blowing up the Washington Monument. The Senate report noted:
The clearest examples of actions directly aimed at the exercise of constitutional rights are those targeting speakers, teachers, writers or publications, and meetings or peaceful demonstrations. Approximately 18 percent of all approved COINTELPRO proposals fell into these categories. The cases include attempts (sometimes successful) to get university and high school teachers fired; to prevent targets from speaking on campus; to stop chapters of target groups from being formed; to prevent the distribution of books, newspapers, or periodicals; to disrupt news conferences; to disrupt peaceful demonstrations, including the SCLC’s Washington Spring Project and Poor People’s Campaign, and most of the large antiwar marches; and to deny facilities for meetings or conferences.24
An FBI memo warned that “the anarchist activities of a few can paralyze institutions of learning, [conscription] induction centers, cripple traffic, and tie the arms of law enforcement officials, all to the detriment of our society.” The FBI declared: “The New Left has on many occasions viciously and scurrilously attacked the Director [J. Edgar Hoover] and the Bureau in an attempt to hamper our investigation of it and to drive us off the college campuses.”
The FBI ordered field offices in 1968 to gather information illustrating the “scurrilous and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities, habits, and living conditions representative of New Left adherents.”25 The headquarters directive informed FBI agents across the land: “Every avenue of possible embarrassment must be vigorously and enthusiastically explored. It cannot be expected that information of this type will be easily obtained, and an imaginative approach by your personnel is imperative to its success.” One FBI internal newsletter encouraged FBI agents to conduct more interviews with antiwar activists “for plenty of reasons, chief of which are it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”26
A major goal of the COINTELPRO against the New Left operations was to “counter the widespread charges of police brutality that invariably arise following student-police encounters.”27 The FBI was especially incensed at criticisms that Chicago policemen used excessive force when they attacked demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The FBI thus launched an illegal program to smear people the FBI believed had made false assertions of police misconduct. As COINTELPRO continued, the FBI targeted more and more groups and used increasingly vicious tactics. The Senate report noted:
The White Hate COINTELPRO [that focused primarily on the Klan] used comparatively few techniques which carried a risk of serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets, while the Black Nationalist COINTELPRO used such techniques extensively. The New Left COINTELPRO, on the other hand, had the highest proportion of proposals aimed at preventing the exercise of free speech. Like the progression in targeting, the use of dangerous, degrading, or blatantly unconstitutional techniques also appears to have become less restrained with each subsequent program.
The FBI continually discovered new enemies. Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston testified of the program’s tendency “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.28
Other federal agencies also trampled citizens’ privacy, rights, and lives during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The IRS used COINTELPRO leads to launch audits against thousands of suspected political enemies of the Nixon administration. The U.S. Army set up its own surveillance program, creating files on 100,000 Americans and targeting domestic organizations such as the Young Americans for Freedom, the John Birch Society, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith.29
The Senate report on COINTELPRO concluded: “The American people need to be assured that never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order. Only a combination of legislative prohibition and Departmental control can guarantee that COINTELPRO will not happen again.”30
The Ford administration derailed legislative reforms in 1976 by promising an administrative fix. Now, 26 years later, Attorney General Ashcroft has thrown the restraints out the window, pretending there was never a valid reason to rein in the FBI.
The more information government gathers on people, the more power it will have over them. The more power it has to monitor their peaceful activities, the more intimidated Americans will become. Regardless of the Bush administration’s intentions in its war on terrorism, the new federal powers threaten the rights and personal security of American citizens.
Notes
Remarks of Attorney General John Ashcroft,” Justice Department Office of Public Affairs, May 30, 2002.
Jerry Berman and James X. Dempsey, “CDT’s Guide to the FBI Guidelines: Impact on Civil Liberties and Security—The Need for Congressional Oversight,” Center for Democracy and Technology, June 26, 2002.
Editorial, “An Erosion of Civil Liberties,” New York Times, May 31, 2002.
Remarks By President George W. Bush during Photo Opportunity at Cabinet Meeting,” Federal News Service, May 30, 2002.
Remarks of Attorney General John Ashcroft,” Justice Department Office of Public Affairs, May 30, 2002.
Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,” Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, April 14, 1976.
Ibid.
Mark Wagenveld, “25 Years Ago, before Watergate, a Burglary Changed History,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 10, 1996.
“COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Covert Action Programs against American Citizens,” Final Report of the Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, April 23, 1976.
Both quotes taken from ibid.
Ibid.
Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, “The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration,” Georgetown Law Journal, December 1991, p. 309.
“The FBI’s Covert Action Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party,” Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities United States Senate, Book III, April 23, 1976.
Ibid.
All quotes taken from “The Use of Informants in FBI Domestic Intelligence Investigations”—Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans—Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, April 23, 1976.
All quotes from “Intelligence Activities and the Rights Of Americans: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Case Study,” Book III of the “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities United States Senate,” April 23, 1976.
All quotes taken from “The Use of Informants.”
All quotes taken from ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
“Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.”
“COINTELPRO.”
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Wagenveld.
“COINTELPRO.”
Ibid.
“Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.”
Ibid.
The Eyes Watching You
1984 and the Surveillance State
JUNE 13, 2013 by SARAH SKWIRE
George Orwell. 1984. New York: Plume, [1949] 2003. 323 pages.
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-eyes-watching-you#ixzz2W7PKenoH
In the kind of horrifying coincidence that surely would have prompted one of his more acerbic essays, the news that various U.S. government surveillance agencies have been gathering data from millions of citizens’ phones, email accounts, and web searches broke during the week of the 64th publication anniversary of George Orwell’s 1984. As the news reports poured in, and as sales of 1984 surged by an astonishing 6,884 percent, a friend asked me whether the PRISM story strikes me as more Orwellian or more Kafkaesque.
My response? We’d better hope it’s Kafkaesque.
No one wants to inhabit a Franz Kafka novel. But the surveillance states he describes do have one thing going for them—incompetence. In Kafka’s stories, important forms get lost, permits are unattainable, and bureaucrats fail to do their jobs. Like the main character in Kafka’s unfinished story, “The Castle,” if you were trapped in Kafka’s world you could live your whole life doing nothing but waiting for a permit. But at least you could live. Incompetence creates a little space.
What is terrifying about Orwell’s 1984 is the complete competence of the surveillance state. Winston Smith begins the novel by believing he is in an awful, but Kafkaesque world where there is still some slippage in the state’s absolute control, and still some room for private action. Winston says that Oceania’s world of telescreens and Thought Police means that there are “always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape.” But he follows that by saying, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” He also believes that while the diary he keeps will inevitably be discovered, the small alcove in his apartment where he writes his diary puts him “out of the range of the telescreen.”
The feeling that some tiny space for private thought and action can be found leads Winston into his relationship with Julia. Though they know they will inevitably be discovered, Winston and Julia believe that, for a time, their relationship and their meeting place will remain secret. They could not be more wrong.
One day after making love to Julia in their clandestine room, Winston, prompted by a singing thrush and a singing prole woman who is doing laundry, has a vision of a future that “belongs to the proles.”
The birds sang, the proles sang. The Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan—everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body.
In this very moment, just as Winston comes alive to what feels like hope and possibility and the dream of some kind of a future for humankind, the telescreen that has been hidden in the room all along speaks to Winston and Julia. The Thought Police break down the door. The couple is taken off to be imprisoned, tortured, and broken.
There has never been any private space for Winston or Julia—not in their “secret” meeting places, not in their sexual rebellion, not even in the few cubic centimeters inside their skulls. “[F]or seven years the Thought Police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifiying glass. There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to infer.” Winston should have taken more seriously the description of Oceania he read in the forbidden book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein:
A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone. Wherever he may be, asleep or awake, working or resting, in his bath or in bed, he can be inspected without warning and without knowing that he is being inspected. Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected.
The Orwellian surveillance state is terrifying not because—as in Kafka—you might be arrested because of a rumor or a mistake, or because despite your innocence you might be caught in the State’s unnavigable maze. It is terrifying because it never makes mistakes. It does not need to listen to rumors. And it knows that no one is ever innocent.
Big Money and the NSA Scandal … How Dangerous is the "Security/Digital Complex"?
Tuesday, 11 June 2013 13:17
By Richard Eskow, Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16909-big-money-and-the-nsa-scandal-how-dangerous-is-the-security-digital-complex
It should be self-evident that recent NSA revelations bring up some grave concerns about civil liberties. But they also raise other profound and troubling questions – about the privatization of our military, our culture’s inflated expectations for digital technology, and the increasingly cozy relationship between Big Corporations (including Wall Street) and Big Defense.
Are these corporations perverting our political process? The campaign war chest for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who today said NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden committed “treason,” is heavily subsidized by defense and intelligence contractors that include General Dynamics, General Atomic, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and Bechtel.
One might argue that a politician with that kind of backing is in no moral position to lecture others about “treason.”
But Feinstein’s funders are decidedly old-school Military/Industrial Complex types. What about the new crowd? This confluence of forces hasn’t been named yet, so for the time being we’ll use a cumbersome label: the “Security/Digital Complex.”
With computers and communications encompassing an ever-larger portion of human activity, we may someday learn that this new force dwarfs even its predecessors in the Feinstein camp when it comes to its impact on our democracy, our economy and our values.
There’s much we don’t know yet, so it’s wise to be cautious in describing this new force. But Edward Snowden’s revelations, and the reactions to them, are offering us a glimpse into rarely-seen intersections of Wall Street wealth, information technology, and the national security state.
Revolving doors.
Reports say that Snowden left government and joined the private sector as part of the massive privatization of government functions, including national security. His recent employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, earns more than 98 percent of its revenue from the government.
Privatization is an ideological pathway. It’s also, as with bank regulation, a path to riches for pliant officials. And, as with Wall Street, the officials feeding at the trough are entirely “bipartisan.” From a New York Times article:
“As evidence of the company’s close relationship with government, the Obama administration’s chief intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., is a former Booz Allen executive. The official who held that post in the Bush administration, John M. McConnell, now works for Booz Allen.”
That’s the revolving door in its purest form, spinning like an electron in your digital profile.
And there’s a lot of money to be made. Last February Booz Allen Hamilton announced two new contracts with Homeland Security, worth a total of $11 billion, for “program management, engineering, technology, business and financial management, and audit support services.”
Wonder who signed off on that deal – and where they’ll be working next year?
It’s who you know.
Booz Allen Hamilton is now a part of the Carlyle Group, the leverage-buyout firm which has contributed to the personal enrichment of a number of very well-known public figures from Administrations of both parties. They include:
Former President George H. W. Bush; Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, and Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci; Arthur Levitt, Bill Clinton’s Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); and Mack McLarty, Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff.
The Bin Laden family was a major shareholder, too, until both parties concluded that the relationship with the Al Qaeda leader’s family (and the source of his wealth) was “receiving more attention than it deserved.”
Carlyle invests in both old-school and digital defense contractors. Members of the Carlyle Group’s Board also have board seats or other affiliations with corporations that include ExxonMobil, MCI Communications, Sprint Nextel, Duke Energy, Reuters, and Ford Motors. Bank affiliations among Carlyle’s leaders include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America.
As a “leveraged buyout” firm, the Carlyle Group purchases companies with borrowed money, and then lays the debt onto its acquisitions. That means it relies heavily on Wall Street connections, Wall Street wealth … and Wall Street’s solvency, which was protected by the 2008 bailouts.
It also means that those companies, including government contractors have to be very profitable. They need to pay off those debts and enrich their new owners, while seeing to it that the financial institutions which underwrite these loans are kept whole.
(Note to Carlyle Board: Sen. Feinstein will be available in 2018 when her current term ends.)
Birth of the Booz
Booz Hamilton Allen is a $5.9 billion company. Most of the work it does would have been performed in by military or civilian government employees – at no markup whatsoever. Thanks to privatization, Booz Allen earned nearly a cool billion in taxpayer-funded profit for those two years alone.
Booz Allen has profited greatly from the explosive growth in national security privatization since 9/11. (It created a chart to illustrate its growth between 2001 and 2010, which we’ve reproduced below. It’s impressive.)
The Times informs us that roughly 23 percent of the company’s revenue over the last decade has come directly from intelligence contracts. Booz says it has a backlog of $10.8 billion in additional “sold” work, which means it’s on track to receive nearly another billion in taxpayer money as profits (if current margins hold).
Booz says it has approximately 25,000 employees. More than three quarters of them hold government security clearances. Roughly half hold clearances of “Top Secret” or higher.
Private Eyes
And yet, for all that, it’s only eighth on the list of the top 100 government contractors.
Dana Priest and William Arkin conducted an intensive two-year investigation of national security for the Washington Post. They identified 1,931 private companies working in “about 10,000 locations” around the country, with 854,000 of their employees holding top-secret clearances.
They also found enormous redundancy and waste, along with an inability for human beings to effectively absorb and use all the information produced. Analysts were then publishing some 50,000 intelligence reports each year. And since this report was completed nearly three years ago, things can only have grown worse.
The huge drain on public coffers is only one of the downsides of this behemoth. Another is the lack of accountability when private employees do government work. That danger was eloquently described to the Times by Stewart A. Baker, former General Counsel to NSA and ex-Homeland Security official.
Cold Fusion
A lot of people are getting rich from national security data contracts. And, coincidentally or not, this corporate-driven national security apparatus seems especially interested in protecting Wall Street banks and bankers.
We’ve seen collusion between corporations and law enforcement on the local level, especially after then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani started renting out the New York City police force to big banks as rent-a-cops under a program called “Paid Detail.” That cozy relationship made it unsurprising, if no less deplorable, when city police officers teamed up with private security guards to evict Occupy demonstrators from Zuccotti Park.
A report on regional “fusion centers, which the Department of Homeland Security created to support inter-agency cooperation and data sharing,suggests that this relationship has been replicated on the national level through the Federal security apparatus. The study by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy is an exhaustively researched glimpse into the cozy relationship between corporations and the National Security State.
The report’s author, Beau Hodai, documents the exhaustive use of government anti-terrorism resources against Occupy, a legal and nonviolent protest movement. Hodai also includes an interesting case study: the Arizona Fusion Center’s close collaboration with bank security personnel at JPMorgan Chase to protect CEO Jamie Dimon during a 2011 visit to Phoenix.
Booz Allen appears to be heavily involved in fusion centers. Its white paper on the topic reads like a sales pitch, and as of this writing more than 500 Booz employees on LinkedIn include the phrase “Fusion Center” in their job titles or descriptions.
JPMorgan Chase, whose CEO received such personal service from the Arizona Fusion Center, has close ties to Booz and the Carlyle Group, with projects that include backing Carlyle’s 2012 acquisition of a Philadelphia refinery; help in finding a buyer for aerospace company Arinc (which was part of Booz); reviewing Virgin Media for a possible takeover bid; and handling the initial share offering for Carlyle itself.
Complex Temptations
Our government’s accelerated dependence on Big Data technologies – one might even say its “fetishization” of them – has troubling implications for the workings of democracy and the apparatus of state.
In naming the “military/industrial complex,” General-turned-President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us that, in meeting crises, “there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”
“Spectacular.” “Costly.” “Miraculous.” “Temptation.”
And they say the General was a taciturn man.
The would-be miracle du jour at the core of today’s scandal is “metadata”: data about data. The corporate and intelligence worlds are infatuated with it. You might even call this wave of fascination a “bubble.”
The Data Bubble
Like any bubble, the “metadata” craze takes something of genuine value and inflates it far beyond its worth. This corporo-bureaucratic fashion trend is contributing to the new Complex’s explosive growth. But, as Priest and Arkin observe, the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough data or “metadata.” It’s that the data isn’t sifted, refined, and evaluated by human beings with human judgment.
“Metadata” is all the rage on Wall Street too. When “market makers” like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase capture a large chunk of the trades in a given area (the top five US banks control well over 90 percent of all derivatives trades, for example) that data gives them extraordinary economic power.
In a very real way, financial institutions are now data institutions – and the “too-big-to-fail” ones are grabbing all the power that comes with the hoarding of information.
Still, it’s a sign of Big Data’s limitations that these banks would have failed anyway if taxpayers hadn’t rescued them. We’ve forgotten that metadata, whether it’s used for credit scores, algorithmic trading, or national security, is inherently subject to flaws – flaws which can’t be fixed when it’s operated in secret or purely out of self-interest.
Metadata as Ideology
Eisenhower warned that the Military/Industrial Complex’s “total influence – economic, political, even spiritual (emphasis ours) – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government …”
We face, in Eisenhower’s words, a spiritual threat, that of Metadata as Ideology. We idealize this algorithmic methodology, even surrender our liberties to it, while overlooking the flawed human origin of the process itself. Speaking as a former designer of large information systems, I recognize that it’s a very useful analytical technique. But as an ideology it’s antithetical to a democratic society:
Where democracy serves the human, metadata serves the mechanical and quantifiable.
Where democracy serves a society, metadata serves its masters.
Where democracy values the individual, metadata values the “set.”
Where democracy is self-correcting (at least in design), metadata is self-replicating and self-reinforcing.
The Long Struggle
The technology is new, but the struggle is old: Corporations like the Dutch East Indies Company and the British East India Company used traded goods to drive a wave of global colonization. Corporations in the Military/Industrial Complex made money from mass-produced weapons of iron and steel.
The weapons of the 21st Century are made of electrons, not metal. But human nature doesn’t change. The Military/Industrial Complex robs our nation of its wealth and many people of their lives. the Security/Digital Complex takes our wealth and has the potential to invade and monitor virtually every aspect of our lives. In the end, that could make it even more powerful than its predecessor.
Booz Allen Hamilton’s corporate slogan is “Delivering results that endure.” Results that endure? That’s exactly what should worry us.
(UPDATE: I chose the word “whistleblower” with care. The AP Standards Editor says that term means “a person who exposes wrongdoing.” I believe there is clear evidence that “exposing wrongdoing” is precisely what Snowden has done.)
The Judicial Lynching of Bradley Manning
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_judicial_lynching_of_bradley_manning_20130609/
Posted on Jun 9, 2013
By Chris Hedges
FORT MEADE, Md.—The military trial of Bradley Manning is a judicial lynching. The government has effectively muzzled the defense team. The Army private first class is not permitted to argue that he had a moral and legal obligation under international law to make public the war crimes he uncovered. The documents that detail the crimes, torture and killing Manning revealed, because they are classified, have been barred from discussion in court, effectively removing the fundamental issue of war crimes from the trial. Manning is forbidden by the court to challenge the government’s unverified assertion that he harmed national security. Lead defense attorney David E. Coombs said during pretrial proceedings that the judge’s refusal to permit information on the lack of actual damage from the leaks would “eliminate a viable defense, and cut defense off at the knees.” And this is what has happened.
Manning is also barred from presenting to the court his motives for giving the website WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables, war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, and videos. The issues of his motives and potentially harming national security can be raised only at the time of sentencing, but by then it will be too late.
The draconian trial restrictions, familiar to many Muslim Americans tried in the so-called war on terror, presage a future of show trials and blind obedience. Our email and phone records, it is now confirmed, are swept up and stored in perpetuity on government computers. Those who attempt to disclose government crimes can be easily traced and prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Whistle-blowers have no privacy and no legal protection. This is why Edward Snowden—a former CIA technical assistant who worked for a defense contractor with ties to the National Security Agency and who leaked to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian the information about the National Security Council’s top-secret program to collect Americans’ cellphone metadata, e-mail and other personal data—has fled the United States. The First Amendment is dead. There is no legal mechanism left to challenge the crimes of the power elite. We are bound and shackled. And those individuals who dare to resist face the prospect, if they remain in the country, of joining Manning in prison, perhaps the last refuge for the honest and the brave.
Coombs opened the trial last week by pleading with the judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, for leniency based on Manning’s youth and sincerity. Coombs is permitted by Lind to present only circumstantial evidence concerning Manning’s motives or state of mind. He can argue, for example, that Manning did not know al-Qaida might see the information he leaked. Coombs is also permitted to argue, as he did last week, that Manning was selective in his leak, intending no harm to national interests. But these are minor concessions by the court to the defense. Manning’s most impassioned pleas for freedom of information, especially regarding email exchanges with the confidential government informant Adrian Lamo, as well as his right under international law to defy military orders in exposing war crimes, are barred as evidence.
Manning is unable to appeal to the Nuremberg principles, a set of guidelines created by the International Law Commission of the United Nations after World War II to determine what constitutes a war crime. The principles make political leaders, commanders and combatants responsible for war crimes, even if domestic or internal laws allow such actions. The Nuremberg principles are designed to protect those, like Manning, who expose these crimes. Orders do not, under the Nuremberg principles, offer an excuse for committing war crimes. And the Nuremberg laws would clearly condemn the pilots in the “Collateral Murder” video and their commanders and exonerate Manning. But this is an argument we will not be allowed to hear in the Manning trial.
Manning has admitted to 10 lesser offenses surrounding his leaking of classified and unclassified military and State Department files, documents and videos, including the “Collateral Murder” video, which shows a U.S. Apache attack helicopter in 2007 killing 12 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and wounding two children on an Iraqi street. His current plea exposes him to penalties that could see him locked away for two decades. But for the government that is not enough. Military prosecutors are pursuing all 22 charges against him. These charges include aiding the enemy, wanton publication, espionage, stealing U.S. government property, exceeding authorized access and failures to obey lawful general orders—charges that can bring with them 149 years plus life.
“He knew that the video depicted a 2007 attack,” Coombs said of the “Collateral Murder” recording. “He knew that it [the attack] resulted in the death of two journalists. And because it resulted in the death of two journalists it had received worldwide attention. He knew that the organization Reuters had requested a copy of the video in FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] because it was their two journalists that were killed, and they wanted to have that copy in order to find out what had happened and to ensure that it didn’t happen again. He knew that the United States had responded to that FOIA request almost two years later indicating what they could find and, notably, not the video.
“He knew that David Finkel, an author, had written a book called ‘The Good Soldiers,’ and when he read through David Finkel’s account and he talked about this incident that’s depicted in the video, he saw that David Finkel’s account and the actual video were verbatim, that David Finkel was quoting the Apache air crew. And so at that point he knew that David Finkel had a copy of the video. And when he decided to release this information, he believed that this information showed how [little] we valued human life in Iraq. He was troubled by that. And he believed that if the American public saw it, they too would be troubled and maybe things would change.”
“He was 22 years old,” Coombs said last Monday as he stood near the bench, speaking softly to the judge at the close of his opening statement. “He was young. He was a little naive in believing that the information that he selected could actually make a difference. But he was good-intentioned in that he was selecting information that he hoped would make a difference.”
“He wasn’t selecting information because it was wanted by WikiLeaks,” Coombs concluded. “He wasn’t selecting information because of some 2009 most wanted list. He was selecting information because he believed that this information needed to be public. At the time that he released the information he was concentrating on what the American public would think about that information, not whether or not the enemy would get access to it, and he had absolutely no actual knowledge of whether the enemy would gain access to it. Young, naive, but good-intentioned.”
The moral order is inverted. The criminal class is in power. We are the prey. Manning, in a just society, would be a prosecution witness against war criminals. Those who committed these crimes should be facing prison. But we do not live in a just society.
The Afghans, the Iraqis, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis and the Somalis know what American military forces do. They do not need to read WikiLeaks. They have seen the bodies, including the bodies of their children, left behind by drone strikes and other attacks from the air. They have buried the corpses of those gunned down by coalition forces. With fury, they hear our government tell lies, accounts that are discredited by the reality they endure. Our wanton violence and hypocrisy make us hated and despised, fueling the rage of jihadists and amassing legions of new enemies against the United States. Manning, by providing a window into the truth, opened up the possibility of redemption. He offered hope for a new relationship with the Muslim world, one based on compassion and honesty, on the rule of law, rather than the cold brutality of industrial warfare. But by refusing to heed the truth that Manning laid before us, by ignoring the crimes committed daily in our name, we not only continue to swell the ranks of our enemies but put the lives of our citizens in greater and greater danger. Manning did not endanger us. He sought to thwart the peril that is daily exacerbated by our political and military elite.
Manning showed us through the documents he released that Iraqis have endured hundreds of rapes and murders, along with systematic torture by the military and police of the puppet government we installed. He let us know that none of these atrocities were investigated. He provided the data that showed us that between 2004 and 2009 there were at least 109,032 “violent deaths” in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians, and that coalition troops were responsible for at least 195 civilian deaths in unreported events. He allowed us to see in the video “Collateral Murder” the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad. It was because of Manning that we could listen to the callous banter between pilots as the Americans nonchalantly fired on civilian rescuers. Manning let us see a U.S. Army tank crush one of the wounded lying on the street after the helicopter attack. The actions of the U.S. military in this one video alone, as law professor Marjorie Cohn has pointed out, violate Article 85 of the First Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits the targeting of civilians, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which requires that wounded be treated, and Article 17 of the First Protocol, which permits civilians to rescue and care for wounded without being harmed. We know of this war crime and many others because of Manning. And the decision to punish the soldier who reported these war crimes rather than the soldiers responsible for these crimes mocks our pretense of being a nation ruled by law.
“I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this, it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general as it applied to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Manning said Feb. 28 when he pleaded guilty to the lesser charges. He said he hoped the release of the information to WikiLeaks “might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counterterrorism while ignoring the situation of the people we engaged with every day.”
But it has not. Our mechanical drones still circle the skies delivering death. Our attack jets still blast civilians. Our soldiers and Marines still pump bullets into mud-walled villages. Our artillery and missiles still raze homes. Our torturers still torture. Our politicians and generals still lie. And the man who tried to stop it all is still in prison.
Read Chris Hedges’ Dig about Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning here.
Trial transcripts used for this report came from the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation, which, because the government refused to make transcripts publicly available, is raising money to have its own stenographer at the trial. Transcripts from the pretrial hearing came from journalist Alexa O’Brien.
27 Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send A Chill Up Your Spine
June 11, 2013 By SD Bullion 8 Comments
“The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.”
“With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”
“Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…“
“To do that, the NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone.
“The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things… And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that… because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny.”
The following are 27 quotes from Edward Snowden about U.S. government spying that should send a chill up your spine…
#1 “The majority of people in developed countries spend at least some time interacting with the Internet, and Governments are abusing that necessity in secret to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate.”
#2 “…I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”
#3 “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.”
#4 “…I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”
#5 “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything.”
#6 “With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”
#7 “Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…”
#8 “To do that, the NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government, or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they are collecting YOUR communications to do so.”
#9 “I believe that when [senator Ron] Wyden and [senator Mark] Udall asked about the scale of this, they [the NSA] said it did not have the tools to provide an answer. We do have the tools and I have maps showing where people have been scrutinized most. We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.”
#10 “…they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them.”
#11 “Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded. …it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life.”
#12 “Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”
#13 “Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”
#14 “I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”
#15 “I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”
#16 “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.”
#17 “I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act.”
#18 “There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich.”
#19 “The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things… And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that… because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny.”
#20 “I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”
#21 “You can’t come up against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk.”
#22 “I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.”
#23 “We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.”
#24 “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end.”
#25 “There’s no saving me.”
#26 “The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won’t be able to help any more. That’s what keeps me up at night.”
#27 “I do not expect to see home again.”
Would you make the same choice that Edward Snowden made? Most Americans would not. One CNN reporter says that he really admires Snowden because he has tried to get insiders to come forward with details about government spying for years, but none of them were ever willing to…
As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they’ve written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies. I always begged them to write about it or to let me do so while protecting their identities. They refused to come forward and believed my efforts to shield them would be futile. “I don’t want to lose my security clearance. Or my freedom,” one told me.
And if the U.S. government has anything to say about it, Snowden is most definitely going to pay for what he has done. In fact, according to the Daily Beast, a directorate known as “the Q Group” is already hunting Snowden down…
The people who began chasing Snowden work for the Associate Directorate for Security and Counterintelligence, according to former U.S. intelligence officers who spoke on condition of anonymity. The directorate, sometimes known as “the Q Group,” is continuing to track Snowden now that he’s outed himself as The Guardian’s source, according to the intelligence officers.
If Snowden is not already under the protection of some foreign government (such as China), it will just be a matter of time before U.S. government agents get him.
And how will they treat him once they find him? Well, one reporter overheard a group of U.S. intelligence officials talking about how Edward Snowden should be “disappeared”. The following is from a Daily Mail article that was posted on Monday…
A group of intelligence officials were overheard yesterday discussing how the National Security Agency worker who leaked sensitive documents to a reporter last week should be ‘disappeared.’
Foreign policy analyst and editor at large of The Atlantic, Steve Clemons, tweeted about the ‘disturbing’ conversation after listening in to four men who were sitting near him as he waited for a flight at Washington’s Dulles airport.
‘In Dulles UAL lounge listening to 4 US intel officials saying loudly leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should be disappeared recorded a bit,’ he tweeted at 8:42 a.m. on Saturday.
According to Clemons, the men had been attending an event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.
As an American, I am deeply disturbed that the U.S. government is embarrassing itself in front of the rest of the world like this.
The fact that we are collecting trillions of pieces of information on people all over the planet is a massive embarrassment and the fact that our politicians are defending this practice now that it has been exposed is a massive embarrassment.
If the U.S. government continues to act like a Big Brother police state, then the rest of the world will eventually conclude that is exactly what we are. At that point we become the “bad guy” and we lose all credibility with the rest of the planet.
......................
Would you be willing to give up what Edward Snowden has given up? He has given up his high paying job, his home, his girlfriend, his family, his future and his freedom just to expose the monolithic spy machinery that the U.S. government has been secretly building to the world. He says that he does not want to live in a world where there isn’t any privacy. He says that he does not want to live in a world where everything that he says and does is recorded. Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the U.S. government has been spying on us to a degree that most people would have never even dared to imagine. Up until now, the general public has known very little about the U.S. government spy grid that knows almost everything about us. But making this information public is going to cost Edward Snowden everything. Essentially, his previous life is now totally over. And if the U.S. government gets their hands on him, he will be very fortunate if he only has to spend the next several decades rotting in some horrible prison somewhere. There is a reason why government whistleblowers are so rare. And most Americans are so apathetic that they wouldn’t even give up watching their favorite television show for a single evening to do something good for society. Most Americans never even try to make a difference because they do not believe that it will benefit them personally. Meanwhile, our society continues to fall apart all around us. Hopefully the great sacrifice that Edward Snowden has made will not be in vain. Hopefully people will carefully consider what he has tried to share with the world. The following are 27 quotes from Edward Snowden about U.S. government spying that should send a chill up your spine…
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http://silverdoctors.com/27-edward-snowden-quotes-about-u-s-government-spying-that-should-send-a-chill-up-your-spine/
DHS Admits Boston Training Drill Involving Backpack Explosives Planned Months Before Marathon
http://intellihub.com/2013/06/11/dhs-admits-boston-training-drill-involving-backpack-explosives-planned-months-before-marathon/
According to the DHS documents acquired by the Boston Globe, the agents were planning on conducting training exercises centered around a fictitious terrorist group called ‘Free America Citizens’, a group that would plant backpacks full of explosives around Boston that the detectives would be forced to track down. Ultimately, of course, this ended up happening at the Boston Marathon itself with precise accuracy. The Globe report reads that “the city was hit with a real terrorist attack executed in a frighteningly similar fashion.”
And the DHS isn’t denying that the training exercise manifested itself at the Boston Marathon, as detailed in the back-end article on the Boston Globe that I discovered while browsing the news.
“The real thing happened before we were able to execute,” a Boston police official told the Boston Globe in the report.
The exercise, labeled as “Operation Urban Shield,” was funded by a $200,000 Homeland Security grant. It was planned months before the Boston Marathon, and it was scheduled to ‘take place’ in official capacity this weekend, according to the sources. But the exercise admission lends further credence to the ignored eyewitness account of bomb sniffing dogs and bomb squads running a training exercise during the morning of the Boston Marathon. Was this training exercise part of Operation Urban Shield?
Interestingly, they specifically detailed that this terrorist group (that presumably is based off of ‘right wing extremists’ and the sovereign citizens movement) would carry a logo of a metal skull wearing an Uncle Sam hat. I’m not claiming there’s a relationship, but I find it funny that even their logo matched up with real events from the Boston Marathon bombings. It was in fact the apparent security at the event that was spotted wearing clothing adorning the image of skulls that turned out to be the logo for the Craft International private security firm.
I will be reporting more on Operation Urban Shield as more information becomes available.
Was Obama Lying Then or Is He Lying Now?
2007: Obama’s Speech on Warrantless Wiretapping.
All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama
More and more, we're counting on having angels in office and making ourselves vulnerable to devils.
By Conor Friedersdorf
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35221.htm
June 08, 2013 "Information Clearing House - Let's assume that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, their staffers, and every member of Congress for the last dozen years has always acted with pure motives in the realm of national security. Say they've used the power they've claimed, the technology they've developed, and the precedents they've established exclusively to fight al-Qaeda terrorists intent on killing us, that they've succeeded in disrupting what would've been successful attacks, and that Americans are lucky to have had men and women so moral, prudent, and incorruptible in charge.
Few Americans believe all of that to be so. Combining the people who didn't trust Bush and the ones who don't trust Obama adds up to a sizable part of the citizenry. But even if all the critics were proved wrong, even if the CIA, NSA, FBI, and every other branch of the federal government had been improbably filled, top to bottom, with incorruptible patriots constitutionally incapable of wrongdoing, this would still be so: The American people have no idea who the president will be in 2017. Nor do we know who'll sit on key Senate oversight committees, who will head the various national-security agencies, or whether the moral character of the people doing so, individually or in aggregate, will more closely resemble George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, John Yoo, or Vladimir Putin.
What we know is that the people in charge will possess the capacity to be tyrants -- to use power oppressively and unjustly -- to a degree that Americans in 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, or 2000 could've scarcely imagined. To an increasing degree, we're counting on having angels in office and making ourselves vulnerable to devils. Bush and Obama have built infrastructure any devil would lust after. Behold the items on an aspiring tyrant's checklist that they've provided their successors:
A precedent that allows the president to kill citizens in secret without prior judicial or legislative review
The power to detain prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial
Ongoing warrantless surveillance on millions of Americans accused of no wrongdoing, converted into a permanent database so that data of innocents spied upon in 2007 can be accessed in 2027
Using ethnic profiling to choose the targets of secret spying, as the NYPD did with John Brennan's blessing
Normalizing situations in which the law itself is secret -- and whatever mischief is hiding in those secret interpretations
The permissibility of droning to death people whose identities are not even known to those doing the killing
The ability to collect DNA swabs of people who have been arrested even if they haven't been convicted of anything
A torture program that could be restarted with an executive order
Even if you think Bush and Obama exercised those extraordinary powers responsibly, what makes you think every president would? How can anyone fail to see the huge potential for abuses?
I am not saying no one would resist a tyrant. Perhaps Congress would assert itself. Perhaps the people would rise up. Then again, perhaps it would be too late by the time the abuses were evident. (America has had horrific abuses of power in the past under weaker executives who were less empowered by technology; and numerous other countries haven't recognized tyrants until it was too late.) Part of the problem is how much the Bush-Obama paradigm permits the executive to do in secret. Take that paradigm, add another successful 9/11-style attack, even after many years of very little terrorism, and who knows what would happen?
No one does.
That's because we're allowing ourselves to become a nation of men, not laws. Illegal spying? Torture? Violating the War Powers Resolution and the convention that mandates investigating past torture?
No matter. Just intone that your priority is keeping America safe. Don't like the law? Just get someone in the Office of Legal Counsel to secretly interpret it in a way that twists its words and betrays its spirit.
You'll never be held accountable.
This isn't a argument about how tyranny is inevitable. It is an attempt to grab America by the shoulders, give it a good shake, and say: Yes, it could happen here, with enough historical amnesia, carelessness, and bad luck. We're not special. Our voters won't always pick good men and women to represent us. Some good women will be corrupted by power, and some bad men will slip through. Other democracies have degraded into quasi-authoritarian states; they didn't expect that to happen until it was too late to stop. We have safeguards to prevent us from following in their footstep. Stop casting them off because you fear al-Qaeda. Stop tempting fate.
Stop acting like the president takes an oath to keep us safe, when his job is to protect and defend the Constitution. Doing so keeps the American project safe. Past generations fought monarchies, slaveholders, and Nazis to win, expand, and protect that project. And we're so risk-averse -- not that we're actually minimizing risk -- that we're "balancing" the very rights in our Constitution against a threat with an infinitesimal chance of killing any one of us? That makes about as much sense as the 5,000 American lives lost when the same ruling class that built the national-security state found it prudent to preempt a perceived threat from Iraq. And we still trust them?
"We have suffered several thousand casualties from 9/11 through today. Suppose we had a 9/11-level attack with 3,000 casualties per year every year. Each person reading this would face a probability of death from this source of about 0.001% each year," Jim Manzi once pointed out at National Review. This is why we're letting the government build an Orwellian spy state more sophisticated than any in history?
Manzi went on:
To demand that the government "keep us safe" by doing things out of our sight that we have refused to do in much more serious situations so that we can avoid such a risk is weak and pathetic.
He was speaking of torture, but the logic applies more generally.
I am not saying that terrorism poses no threat -- of course it does. Of course we ought to dedicate substantial resources to preventing all the attacks that can be stopped without violating our founding documents, laws, values, or sense of proportion. For the national-security state, loosed of the Constitution's safeguards, is a far bigger threat to liberty than al-Qaeda will ever be. Vesting it with more power every year -- expanding its size, power, and functions in secret without any debate about the wisdom of the particulars -- is an invitation to horrific abuses, and it renders the concept of government by the people a joke. The ruling class is trying to keep us ignorant of what it's doing on behalf of us, because it doesn't want us to object!
You'd think, listening to those who defend the national security state's expansion, that the excesses detailed in the Church Committee report never happened; that the horrific abuses of our own era never happened; that the FBI and the CIA have unblemished records respecting the rights of Americans. In fact, America always overestimates its ability to anticipate and preempt abuses.
Yet Americans think they're special. If you doubt that, ask yourself what the average American would say if they heard about China pulling call records on millions of innocent Chinese people.
"Those authoritarian Communists."
We go easier on our own.
America has stepped back from the brink in the past when wars ended. But we've never had a "war" go on this long -- and there's no end in sight. It's time for the people to pressure their elected representatives, so that, through Congress, we can dismantle the infrastructure Bush and Obama have built. In less than four years, an unknown person will start presiding over the national-security state. He or she will be an ambitious power seeker who will guiltlessly misrepresent his or her character to appeal to different voters, lie countless times on the campaign trail, and break numerous promises while in office. That's a best-case scenario that happens every time!
For once, let's preempt that threat.
It's the Corporations, Stupid
Edward Snowden: Saving Us From the United Stasi of America
By Daniel Ellsberg, Guardian UK
10 June 13
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/424-national-security/17863-focus-edward-snowden-saving-us-from-stasi-of-america
Snowden's whistleblowing gives us a chance to roll back what is tantamount to an 'executive coup' against the US constitution
n my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the US constitution.
Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.
The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa – but that unconstitutionally sweeping warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, almost totally deferential to executive requests. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: "It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp."
For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense – as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time – as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads –they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor. They are also black holes for information that the public needs to know.
The fact that congressional leaders were "briefed" on this and went along with it, without any open debate, hearings, staff analysis, or any real chance for effective dissent, only shows how broken the system of checks and balances is in this country.
Obviously, the United States is not now a police state. But given the extent of this invasion of people's privacy, we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale anti-war movement – like the one we had against the war in Vietnam – or, more likely, if we suffered one more attack on the scale of 9/11, I fear for our democracy. These powers are extremely dangerous.
There are legitimate reasons for secrecy, and specifically for secrecy about communications intelligence. That's why Bradley Mannning and I – both of whom had access to such intelligence with clearances higher than top-secret – chose not to disclose any information with that classification. And it is why Edward Snowden has committed himself to withhold publication of most of what he might have revealed.
But what is not legitimate is to use a secrecy system to hide programs that are blatantly unconstitutional in their breadth and potential abuse. Neither the president nor Congress as a whole may by themselves revoke the fourth amendment – and that's why what Snowden has revealed so far was secret from the American people.
In 1975, Senator Frank Church spoke of the National Security Agency in these terms:
"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
The dangerous prospect of which he warned was that America's intelligence gathering capability – which is today beyond any comparison with what existed in his pre-digital era – "at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left."
That has now happened. That is what Snowden has exposed, with official, secret documents. The NSA, FBI and CIA have, with the new digital technology, surveillance powers over our own citizens that the Stasi – the secret police in the former "democratic republic" of East Germany – could scarcely have dreamed of. Snowden reveals that the so-called intelligence community has become the United Stasi of America.
So we have fallen into Senator Church's abyss. The questions now are whether he was right or wrong that there is no return from it, and whether that means that effective democracy will become impossible. A week ago, I would have found it hard to argue with pessimistic answers to those conclusions.
But with Edward Snowden having put his life on the line to get this information out, quite possibly inspiring others with similar knowledge, conscience and patriotism to show comparable civil courage – in the public, in Congress, in the executive branch itself – I see the unexpected possibility of a way up and out of the abyss.
Pressure by an informed public on Congress to form a select committee to investigate the revelations by Snowden and, I hope, others to come might lead us to bring NSA and the rest of the intelligence community under real supervision and restraint and restore the protections of the bill of rights.
Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSA's surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans' and foreign citizens' privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we're trying to protect.
Obama Should Have Given Americans a Choice
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obama_should_have_given_americans_a_choice_20130608/
Posted on Jun 8, 2013
By Peter Z. Scheer
President Obama defended the government’s massive surveillance programs Friday, saying they “help us prevent terrorist attacks.”
“I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs,” Obama said during an exchange with the press in San Jose, Calif. “My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards. But my assessment and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks.”
Despite what he called, “the modest encroachments on the privacy that are involved,” Obama came to the conclusion that “it was worth us doing.” He added: “Some other folks may have a different assessment on that.”
Isn’t it a pity the president didn’t have an opportunity to make such a case before the public, perhaps a national election during which the voters could weigh his arguments and make their own assessment as to whether such “modest encroachments” on one of our most cherished liberties were worth it? The president must have been too busy in 2012 to think of it. His team was reportedly engaged at the time in a mad dash to put down some limits on the use of drones to assassinate foreigners lest Mitt Romney win the election and that awesome power be placed, like so many others exercised by this president and the one who came before him, in someone else’s hands.
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here: Although most of the companies mentioned in the news have denied this, it was reported this week that the National Security Agency and the FBI have direct access to the communications and files stored on the servers of the biggest technology companies. This news broke just after we learned that the government probably has access to the phone records of all Americans. Which is, in turn, on top of the recent revelations that the Obama administration has used its power through the Justice Department and the IRS to spy on reporters and target conservative political groups’ tax-exempt status applications for particular scrutiny. Of course let’s not forget that the president also maintains a secret “kill list” of assassination targets.
This week The New York Times wrote that the president, who once promised a restoration of civil liberties, had “lost all credibility” on the issue of transparency. That’s a nice way of saying don’t trust that man, and with the aforementioned list of sins, I’m forced to agree. Obama said his would be a transparent government, but, as the paper’s editorial board pointed out, it is only because of conscientious leakers and news outlets willing to publish what they discover that we know anything about the president’s many controversial and secret activities, which, whenever they are discovered, he claims are for the benefit of the people. Indeed, Obama has been more ruthless than even George W. Bush in his pursuit of whistle-blowers and leakers, locking away individuals who expose graft, torture and war crimes, while simultaneously presiding over press intimidation. Obama says he’s looking for terrorists. So why is he reading The Associated Press’ emails?
“When I came into this office, I made two commitments that are more important than any commitment I made: No. 1, to keep the American people safe; and No. 2, to uphold the Constitution,” he said in San Jose. It seems the president put those in order of importance, as he sees it. Ben Franklin, you might have heard, would disagree. He’s the goof who said, “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
The president said Friday, “The programs that have been discussed over the last couple days in the press are secret in the sense that they’re classified. But they’re not secret in the sense that when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program. With respect to all these programs, the relevant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs. These are programs that have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006.”
That may be, but these programs were never authorized by the American people, directly, and since we’re talking about a pretty fundamental breach of the Constitution, isn’t that a reasonable expectation? Are the Senate and House intelligence committees truly adequate representation for more than 314 million people?
The freedoms and rights enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are sacred and rare in this world. That is why it takes such monumental political tests to amend those documents. Not a Patriot Act. Not a president, a couple of committees and some secret judges. It is to be done in the light of day with the consent of the governed.
As a senator, Barack Obama was vehemently opposed to the abuses of power by the Bush administration. He rejected the “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand.” If President Obama changed his mind about that, it seems to me there was a perfectly appropriate time to say so, and that would have been, at the latest, before the 2012 election.
AMAZING Speech by US Army Iraq War Veteran - MUST SEE!!! (VIDEO)
Lindsey Williams – K-Talk – Mills Crenshaw – June 2013
http://www.lindseywilliams.net/lindsey-williams-k-talk-mills-crenshaw-june-2013-post/
Shermann
Gerald Celente: Public Anger Grows In Turkey, Police Brutality Is Nothing New (VIDEO)
http://xrepublic.tv/node/3626
Shermann
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Columbus Found America And We Lost It
The How and The Why
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