AlterNet

The People of Brazil Are Fed Up With a Corrupt and Crooked Economy

Conor Creighton, The Guardian — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:26:00 -0700

A bus fare increase in Brazil was the straw that broke the camel's back.

For pedestrians São Paulo became a rare kind of paradise on Monday night. The protest being called the "free pass movement" meant for once in this car mad capital, the walkers had right of way.

There were close to 80,000 of us on the streets of the city. I was there to report but also to protest. I'm about to marry a Brazilian. This place in my future.

The protest met at Largo da Batata and then, marching in four different directions, they slowed the traffic down until there were 250km of tailbacks and the city was tangled up in traffic chaos that lasted till midnight.

Four nights before they'd tried to do the same thing but the police attacked with teargas and rubber bullets. One minute the crowd were chanting "no violence", the next they were firing right at us. We got herded between a fence and a sheer drop on to a motorway. People were crying, from teargas and from terror. Other protesters reached over the fence and pulled us free. It was the kind of citizen heroics you see in a blockbuster, but hope you'll never have to witness in real life.

That was the background. A series of much smaller protests over a 20 centavo increase in the bus fare had been met by ferocious police violence. They deliberately went for the journalists. Firing into the press pack and shooting at photographers on balconies. They ran through the crowds, they raided bars and cafes. They made hundreds of arrests. They sent in the cavalry. Passersby caught up in the madness were shot at. More than a hundred people were injured.

The governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin, was in Paris the whole time. From there he called the protesters vandals and troublemakers.

So last night, with people enraged by what they'd seen in the media reports, there were protests in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Porto Alegre, Belém, Salvador and Maceió. A quarter of a million Brazilians took to the streets. In Brasilia they climbed on to the roof of parliament. In Rio they set fire to the assembly. But with just a few exceptions every one of the protests passed peacefully.

Some people are calling this a civil war between the people and the politicians. The 20 centavos was the straw that broke the camel's back. A back that's been trembling for some time.

In spite of the economic surge in Brazil the country is still unfair, and horribly corrupt. Politicians earn 28 times the minimum wage. Their expenses, which are reimbursed, can run as high as their salaries. And to put it in context, the minimum wage isn't only for low-skilled Brazilians: teachers too don't earn much more than that either.

The health service, the education system and the police service are all in need of a big fix.

The centre left government, Partido dos Trabalhadores, was voted in on a wave of warmth, idealism and promises to do just that in 2002. But the accusations waved on placards and flags last night showed clearly that for many people the warmth has gone.

"Keep your World Cup – we want education and health", "It's not about 20 centavos – it's about dignity", "The people have woken up".

The stereotype of protest in Brazil is the children of the rich out in the street waving placards as a rite of passage. It's all too easy to sneer at. But what's happening now is very different. There are families in the marches. There are older people too. There are middle-class kids and there are kids from poor communities. They're all singing the same song, "Come to the streets". It works. They come.

President Dilma was booed during her opening speech at the Confederations Cup. Protesters camped outside the home of Governor Alckmin. "Don't worry," they chanted, "we'll still be here when you get back from Paris."

7-Eleven Stores Raided, Owners Charged with Exploiting Immigrant Employees

Associated Press, The Guardian — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:54:00 -0700

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were executing search warrants at more than 40 other stores across the country suspected of similar infractions.

Nine owners and managers of 7-Eleven stores across Long Island and in Virginia were charged on Monday in a scheme to exploit immigrants from Pakistan and the Philippines, in part by paying them using the stolen Social Security numbers of a child and three dead people while stealing most of their wages.

Most of the defendants were arrested early Monday as federal authorities raided 14 franchise stores. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were executing search warrants at more than 40 other stores across the country suspected of similar infractions, authorities said at a news conference in Brooklyn.

Four defendants who hold both US and Pakistani citizenship belong to a family that has participated in social events with Pakistan's former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, prosecutors said in court papers as they highlighted foreign ties while seeking to have the defendants held without bail until trial. Another defendant is a citizen of the Philippines. The government said the defendants pocketed tens of millions of dollars in the scheme, hiding some of the money.

Federal indictments naming eight men and one woman allege that since 2000 they employed more than 50 immigrants who didn't have permission to be in the U.S. They tried to conceal the immigrants' employment by stealing the identities of about two dozen people – including those of the child, the dead and a Coast Guard cadet – and submitting the information to the 7-Eleven payroll department.

When 7-Eleven's headquarters sent the wages for distribution, the employers stole up to 75% of the workers' pay, authorities said. The defendants also forced the workers to live in houses they owned and pay them rent in cash, they added.

"The defendants not only systematically employed illegal immigrants, but concealed their crimes by raiding the cradle and the grave to steal the identities of children and even the dead," US attorney Loretta Lynch said in a statement. "Finally, these defendants ruthlessly exploited their immigrant employees, stealing their wages and requiring them to live in unregulated boarding houses, in effect creating a modern day plantation system."

Lynch told a news conference the stolen identifications were "recycled from store to store and state to state" in a case driven by greed among defendants who bought big houses.

The government seized the franchise rights of 10 stores in New Yorkand four stores in Virginia. The stores will remain open under the parent company's operation. Authorities said the stores had generated $182m in profits shared by the defendants and 7-Eleven.

Immigration officials detained 18 workers, including some who first notified authorities about the alleged fraud in 2010. Lynch said the workers would be processed through the system, with some who served as whistleblowers being able to remain in the country while the case is prosecuted.

"Several workers came forward and complained," she said of employees who were recruited from the same ethnic communities as the defendants.

The defendants were to appear in court on Long Island and Norfolk, Virginia, later in the day to face wire fraud conspiracy, identity theft and alien harboring charges. They face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of conspiracy and other charges. Those arrested included a married Long Island couple who owned, co-owned or controlled a dozen 7-Eleven franchise stores on Long Island and Virginia. The couple bought their first franchise license in 1988.

The government said the franchises were licensed by Dallas-based 7-Eleven Inc., the US subsidiary of Seven & I Holdings, which operates, licenses or franchises 49,000 convenience stores worldwide, including 7-Eleven stores in 16 countries.

A 7-Eleven spokesman said the company was cooperating with the investigation, but declined further comment.

The case reflects stepped-up enforcement against employers using bogus documentation for immigrant workers. In the past two years, federal authorities have brought similar charges against more than 500 business-owners and managers, said James Hayes, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's New York office.

"There's real teeth to these laws, and we're using them now more than ever before," Hayes said.

Hayes said the workers in the 7-Eleven cases were not innocent victims in the scheme but also were exploited by bosses who paid them a fraction of what they were owed for working up to 100 hours a week.

Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc also came under investigation in recent years for hiring workers who were in the country illegally. Last year, federal prosecutors charged a Minneapolis man who ran a company that provides labor to large poultry farms with transporting and harboring illegal immigrants.

Haeyoung Yoon, senior staff attorney for the National Employment Law Project, said that low-wage employers are more prone to not having the proper documentation for their workers. Once the fraud is exposed, the workers typically end up getting fired on the spot and sometimes deported, Yoon said.

14-Year-Old Girl Sexually Assaulted by Philly Cop

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:52:00 -0700

The police officer, 36-year-old Anthony Dattilo, could serve more than four years in state prison.

A former cop in Philadelphia has pled guilty to sexuallty assaulting a 14-year-old girl, the website PhillyBurbs.com reports. The police officer, 36-year-old Anthony Dattilo, could serve more than four years in state prison. He was fired from the police force after he was arrested last year.

He pleaded guilty to “indecent assault, unlawful contact with a minor, promoting the prostitution of a minor and related charges,” the Philadelphia news outlet reported.

The case dates back to May 2012, when Dattilo was arrested. The 14-year-old victim had sent a text message to her family saying she was being held against her will at a motel. After the family contacted police, law enforcement went out looking for her, and found them.

The 14-year-old girl said that she had been visiting her 21-year-old cousin, who had received a phone call from Dattilo. Dattilo had paid for sex with the 21-year-old in the past, according to court records, and offered to pay $100 for more sex that night. Dattilo also offered to pay $100 for sex with the 14-year-old.

Dattilo had sex with the older girl while the 14-year-old was in the room, and then began to touch the younger girl. Law enforcement found them while Dattilo was sexually assaulting the 14-year-old.

Dattilo will be a registered sex offender for 10 years, and is currently free on bail while awaiting sentencing.

The older cousin, 22-year-old Theresa Cameron, will stand trial in September. The attorney general did not discuss details of Cameron’s case with the news outlet.

Celebrate the Defeat of the Granny Bashers! Billionaire-backed Campaign Fails to Cut Social Security and Medicare

Dean Baker, Beat the Press — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:50:00 -0700

The Peter Peterson-inspired Campaign to Fix the Debt could not convince Americans to hurt seniors.

It isn't often that progressives in the United States have much to celebrate. After all, the news has swung between bad and worse for most of the last three decades. That is why we should be celebrating the victory over the Campaign to Fix the Debt and its efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Just to remind everyone, the Campaign to Fix the Debt (CFD) is yet another Peter Peterson-inspired initiative that has as its main goal cutting and/or privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Peterson has used the billions of dollars he earned as a Wall Street investment banker and private equity fund manager to finance a whole slew of Washington-based outfits for this purpose over the last two decades.

The CFD was the biggest and boldest effort yet, incorporating funding and support from the heads of many of the largest corporations in America. It hoped to take advantage of the deficits that resulted from the collapse of the housing bubble.

The idea was to whip up hysteria over a deficit crisis. They wanted to paint a picture of out-of-control government spending that could only be addressed by major cuts to the country's two most important and popular social programs. While they got the cooperation of much of the national media, who consistently put the CFD's views and spokespeople at the center of the budget debate, the facts refused to cooperate.

First, the real scary projections of exploding deficits in the next two decades largely disappeared as the rate of health care cost growth slowed sharply. When the Congressional Budget Office and other official forecasters incorporated slower health care cost growth into their numbers, the deficits projections no longer provoked the same sort of hyper-ventilation. Slower projected health care cost growth eliminated almost 70 percent of the projected shortfall in Medicare.

Second, there were actually substantial cuts in the budget, both in 2011 and more recently as a result of the sequester. These cuts are not good news, they are hurting important programs. They also are slowing the economy and costing jobs, but they have lowered projected deficits to levels that fall within almost anyone's acceptable range.

Finally, the intellectual case for a looming debt crisis got blown out of the water because of the famous Reinhart-Rogoff Excel spreadsheet error. The uncovering of this error led to a debate that showed conclusively that there is no debt cliff at 90 percent of GDP. Furthermore, the evidence that there is causation from high debt to slower growth (as opposed to the opposite) is weak to non-existent. The idea that we were about to raise our debt to levels that would lead to a sharp falloff in growth had no basis in reality.

As a result of this turn of events, the FTD crew seem prepared to abandon ship. Maya MacGuineas, the leading spokesperson for FTD, apparently having given up on Congress, was last seen calling on Silicon Valley to use its technological prowess to disrupt the political process. And the Washington Post, which has been an open CFD cheerleader, mournfully noted the improbability of a deal involving major cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

In this case the strong support of the public for these programs -- which cuts across party and demographic lines -- overcame the power of corporate money and the political elite. When push came to shove, not enough politicians were prepared to go against the strongly held views of their constituents. And it helped that the facts were on their side.

It would be great if we could switch from defense to offense. The Wall Street financial types who brought on this economic catastrophe are richer and more politically powerful than ever. They are laughing at the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, and looking to several more decades of free "too-big-to-fail" insurance from the government. In the same vein, other major industries such as the pharmaceutical companies, the health insurance industry, and the telecommunications industry, continue to rake in record profits due to their monopoly power and government protections.

It would be great if the same people who recognized cuts to Social Security and Medicare as attacks on low- and middle-income people could also see the need to move the ball forward onto the other team's turf. This means applying the same sort of sales taxes to financial speculation that the rest of us pay when we buy clothes or shoes. It means breaking up the big banks. It means ending the abuse of patent monopolies by drug companies who push bad drugs at high prices. And it means ending abuses of market power in a number of industries.

The result will be a somewhat smaller share of the pie for those on top and a larger share for everyone else. And it will almost certainly also mean a more rapidly growing economy. The latter would especially be true if we could reverse the sequester and other pointless austerity measures.

But the move to offense is not about to happen right now. And with all the money it has available, we can't even assume the CFD effort will stay dead.

But we should take a moment to celebrate the victory we have achieved. So pick up a glass of the beverage of your choosing and drink a toast to Social Security and Medicare, to the people whose lives they have made more secure, and to the people who have worked to ensure that these programs are there for current generations and those yet to come in the decades ahead.

Immigration Reform Must Consider Why People Migrate in the First Place

Jaisal Noor, The Real News Network — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:38:00 -0700

"Unless there's an alternative to the neoliberal economic order, in 20 years we'll have a similar debate about what to do with undocumented people that will be here because of the same neoliberal policies."

The following is a transcript originally published in The Real News Network.

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER:Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jaisal Noor in Baltimore.

On Tuesday, the Senate voted to begin debate on its version of the comprehensive immigration reform bill currently before Congress. Now joining us to discuss this bill is Professor Alfonso Gonzales. He's at Lehman College at the City University of New York and the author of the upcoming book Reform without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State.

Thank you for joining us, Professor Gonzales.

ALFONSO GONZALES, PROF. POLITICAL SCIENCE, LEHMAN COLLEGE - CUNY: You're welcome.

NOOR: So, Professor Gonzales, President Obama said on Tuesday there's no reason why we can't have comprehensive immigration reform by the end of the summer. What's your reaction to this push to get comprehensive immigration reform passed and the current versions of the bill in the Senate and the House?

GONZALES: Well, the efforts to pass immigration reform today are a product of the last, really, decade of Latino migrant activism. In 2000, there was negotiations between President Fox of Mexico and President Bush, and they were going to broker an immigration reform deal that was going to basically militarize the border, seal the border, and create a guest worker program. That bill fell apart because of 9/11. Certain groups in civil society, anti-immigrants groups, nativist groups in Washington, D.C., were able to use the security concerns around 9/11 to sabotage immigration reform bills. And really there's been about--at least five--and it depends how you count it--at least five immigration reform proposals that have been on the table since 2000. And this particular bill is the latest manifestation of these proposals.

And essentially what all these proposals seek to do is what I call state-managed migration. And it's not just immigration enforcement, because when people say immigration enforcement, that assumes that the state is only concerned about preventing people from coming in and regulating the conditions for them coming in. But what we really see going on, not just in the United States but in Europe and other parts of the world, is that states are trying to manage migrant flows. And this bill and the many bills that have been proposed like it essentially seek to create a long-term, temporary [inaud.]

...

So what the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, or S 744, is trying to do is trying to do what the last five or six immigration reform proposals have sought to do since 2000, and that's secure a temporary, independent, a temporary and flexible, meaning highly exploitable labor force that can come in and serve the interests of capital but at the same time not give these folks their [inaud.] temporary status, essentially what you're doing is you're securing cheap labor but preventing those in these different types of temporary status from having the same rights as U.S. citizens. And that makes these workers extra exploitable, super exploitable, or what academics like to say, like to call it turns these undocumented workers into--they already are flexible workers, but it secures a stable, flexible labor force over the long run.

NOOR: And can you talk about the aspects of this bill that you support and the aspects that you oppose?

GONZALES: Well, there's many important things to recognize here. Obviously, this is a bill that a lot of us are critical of, and if someone's undocumented, they face the fear of deportation every day. They face the possibility of going out to get a gallon of milk for their kids and not coming back if the police stop them with all the enforcement stuff in place. So I understand that having some type of relief from deportation, at least in the immediate--through this registered provisional status--.

...

So what this bill's going to do: it's going to give undocumented people registered professional immigration status, RPI status. And RPI status is a temporary status for people who have no history with the law. Basically you have to have almost a perfect record to qualify for the RPI status. And if you qualify for RPI status, you're basically going to be in a temporary status for ten years. So I can understand if someone's undocumented how this is an important step forward, because it prevents them from being deported in the short run. Okay?

So that's the best thing about this bill and the worst thing at the same time, because it's not--I mean, it's good because it prevents people from getting deported, but over the long run this RPI status is linked to border militarization. In fact, this is the first time that we've seen an immigration reform bill that makes the legalization process, the path towards getting a green card--from green card to citizenship status, it makes that dependent on the border being secure. And this concept of the border being secured is such a subjective concept that we're in a situation where the DHS and, depending on what amendments go through, possibly border civil society groups that can be anti-immigrant, governors such as Jan Brewer [incompr.] of governors from the border states, it might be up to them to say when the border's secure. So when you allow border security to be defined by such subjective forces and you link legalization to border security, essentially what you're doing is [incompr.] people in a temporary status for a very long time. And that is one of the most problematic aspects of this bill.

In addition to the RPI status and border militarization, this bill is going to result in 3,500 new agents working for ICE and the DHS in customs and border enforcement. So we have 3,500 new, basically, agents of the Homeland Security state. We're going to have more drones in the air. We're going to have the continued use of National Park troops at the border to continue building walls, to install seismic sensors. We're going to continue to see the expansion of programs like E-Verify.

This bill will expand E-Verify. Within five years E-Verify will become a program that has been expanded nationally to all employers in the United States. And what that's essentially going to do is going to--if you're undocumented, it's going to make it impossible for undocumented folks to find any work. Essentially, E-Verify is institutionalizing the immigration enforcement through attrition strategy developed by the nativist right in think tanks in Washington, D.C.

So the bill has a lot of problems.

And, you know, we have to look at this bill and say not everyone's going to qualify for RPI status. I mean, we're--just right now with DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, I know a lot of young people who haven't qualified for DACA or a lot of folks that didn't qualify for really mundane things, like their--some of their paperwork not being--not necessarily having the same--a discrepancy in the paperwork. You know, maybe they have a certain birthday on their birth certificate in Mexico, they came over here and they applied for a green card and were rejected and there is a discrepancy on the birth date on the birth certificate in Mexico and the birth certificate here--they don't qualify. I've had students who've been beat up and falsely arrested by the NYPD because of the criminal record that's wrongfully on their--this wrongful criminal record that was imposed on them through police abuse. They don't qualify for DACA. Or students that turn 31 that don't qualify for DACA.

We're going to see the same type of stuff happen with this RPI status. We're going to see a lot of folks not qualify for RPI status. And again, that's problematic, because there's still going to be a large sector that's going to be outside of this RPI status and this so-called path to citizenship. In fact, I'm really doubtful that the RPI status will lead to citizenship as long as it's linked to border security.

NOOR: So, Professor Gonzales, you've mentioned how many young people will not be included in this bill, will not benefit from it, yet it's been the work of DREAM activists and another young activists that have--many have argued have led to the point where this bill is now being pushed forward in Congress.

GONZALES:Absolutely. Let's get one thing straight. If it wasn't for the immigrant rights social movement that developed over the last ten years, we wouldn't even have this bill. As problematic as this bill is, we would not have this bill.

To understand the contemporary immigrant rights movement, we have to go to 2005, when the 109th Congress proposed HR 4437, the Sensenbrenner bill. The Sensenbrenner bill was going to turn 11 million people into felons, and it was going to--it was basically going to be the worst immigration reform bill proposed in 100 years. And HR 4437 passed in the House of Representatives, and the Democrats were on the defensive trying to defeat HR 4437.

What happened in January and February 2006: the immigrant rights movement got organized, and in ways that it hadn't been organized before. Previous to 2006, the immigrant rights movement was basically comprised of select nonprofits and unions, and after 2006, the immigrant rights movement gets popularized, and it becomes a multisector movement, where it's not just major nonprofits located in Washington, D.C., and unions; it's also small church groups, it's also small youth organizations, student organizations, hometown associations, independent activists, day laborers. These groups come together in early 2006, actually, in Riverside, California, in February--I think it was February 11, 2006. These groups come together in Riverside California at a national conference, and they plan a series of mass mobilizations to defeat HR 4437. They defeated HR 4437, folks. If it wasn't for the immigrant rights movement, HR 4437 would have moved forward, and it probably would have passed in the House because the Democrats didn't have the audacity to really stand up against this bill. In fact, it was during the mass mobilizations of 2006 that the Senate got the courage to propose an alternative bill that would actually cancel out with HR 4437.

But the immigrant rights movement was demanding full legalization for the--back then it was 12 million, 'cause they departed actually--they've deported at least 2 million people since 2006. I would actually say it's probably about 3 million. In 2006, we had 12 million people here. Now they're saying that there's 11 million undocumented people. Okay? The demand 2006 was the full and immediate legalization of the undocumented. The demand in 2006, at least in Los Angeles, where I was active in studying the immigrant rights movement, immigrant rights activists were saying, we want to see an end to border militarization, we want to see an end to police and immigration authorities collaborating in our county jails and in our prisons. The immigrant rights movement in 2006 had much more radical demands.

Now our demands have been watered down. And the watering down of these demands has resulted in something like this bill that we have in the Senate today, S 744, which, although it would give contemporary legal relief in the long run, it's not going to dismantle the structures of state violence that have resulted in the deportation of at least 2 million people.

...

--largest mass expulsions that we've seen in the history of humankind. We've seen 4 million people being deported--.

...

The United States, at least since the 1990s, has deported 4 million people. The deportation of 4 million people, the physical removal of 4 million people, is a monumental feat in state violence. I can't think of a--very few countries have got rid of 4 million people, and at least in the 21st century, and the United States is one of them. We've deported millions of people to Latin America, to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, to the Philippines, to Cambodia. In these mass deportations we're deporting--.

...

To countries where they don't--where they're strangers to these countries. Yet somehow we are still considered the most democratic country on the planet. And that's really interesting. If any other country in the world deported 4 million people, expelled 4 million people from its country, I think we would begin to question the democratic credentials of the country.

NOOR:Professor Gonzales, what would a just immigration reform bill look like in your opinion?

GONZALES: Well, at the very least we should see a bill that gives people a quick, swift, and clear path to citizenship. The current path to citizenship is riddled with tripwires, it's riddled with conditions, which I'm scared that we'll never actually see people get citizenship with this bill as it stands. And it's only going to get worse as amendments come up from the Republicans and as a bill emerges from the House. So I would say that a just immigration reform bill would give people a quick path toward citizenship. In fact, IRCA, 1986, people had to wait 19 months to get a green card, and once they had a green card, they could apply for citizenship. I think 19 months should be the minimum that people should have to wait to get a green card and a path to citizenship.

A just immigration reform bill would actually result in a changing U.S. foreign-policy, because that's really the real issue here, folks. We've got to see the mass migration of people from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States as a direct product of the neoliberal economic policies that these countries adopted at the suggestion of the World Bank and the IMF under the so-called Washington consensus, which promoted the adoption of these policies throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and the rest of the developing world. It's those policies that have led to the mass displacement of people from the developing world, from the Global South to the United States.

And these current immigration reform bills, they don't get to the heart of the matter. In fact, they assume that all we need to do is give people temporary status, turn them into guest workers, and build a border fence, that that's going to resolve the contradictions of globalization and migration. It's not, folks. What we have in front of us here with S 744 is a state-managed migration, where the state can bring people in as temporary workers and kick them out as soon as they're no longer needed. And that is an undemocratic process.

Historically this country has always wanted to have cheap flexible labor, a racialized labor force that they can treat different than the rest of the labor force but not give them the same rights of the majority of Americans. That is the ghost that haunts American political history, and this is something that we need to get over. And it's not going to be done simply through an immigration reform bill. That's going to take a mass movement of immigrants, of working-class people, especially people of color, to begin to question these historical policies, this historic tendency in this country to reduce people to simply workers and not giving them their rights as human beings.

NOOR: Alfonso Gonzales, thank you for joining us.

GONZALES:You're welcome.

NOOR: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

~~~

NOOR:What would a just immigration reform bill look like?

GONZALES:At a minimum, we should use IRCA as the bar. And IRCA made people wait 19 months before they can get a green card. So they were only in temporary status for 19 months. I would say that a just immigration reform bill would move people through this temporary status to a green card status and to a path to citizenship as quickly as possible, 19 months, maybe 20 months. I think that was--it would be fair if it was for 1986. With the technology back then, why can't it be done today with this knowledge that we have now?

A just immigration reform bill would reallocate resources from border enforcement and internal--interior enforcement, which we currently have too much of, and reinvest those dollars in developing programs in Latin America and the Caribbean and other developing countries, because currently we have to see that the main reason why people are migrating here is because of lack of jobs, the lack of economic opportunity in this countries.

A just immigration reform bill would not require these punitive fines and these punitive forced assimilation in making people--making LPR status, legal permanent resident status, dependent on speaking English. It would recognize that speaking English should not--it would recognize that people have a right to be in the United States, that we have a historic responsibility and obligation to countries throughout the world where they've adopted the policies that we recommended to them, that we have a historic responsibility to recognize the humanity of these workers and to allow them to have rights here regardless of what language they speak. I don't know. Since when does speaking English become a requirement for having human and civil, political rights? So I think a just immigration reform bill would start with that.

But I want to be clear on one thing. Justice for migrants cannot be reduced to any one immigration reform bill. We have to see that the reason why we have millions of people here is because the adoption of neoliberal policies over the last 30 years in Latin America and the Global South, unless there's an alternative to the neoliberal economic order, even if this bill goes through, in 15, 20 years we're going to have a similar debate about what to do with the undocumented people that are going to be here because of those policies.

And there has to also be a movement within the United States to question the racial politics of our immigration laws. We have to see that historically the United States has always wanted to secure a cheap labor force and secure a cheap racialized labor force, that it does not give the same rights that it gives to the rest of Americans. So what we need to do is basically recognize the humanity of these workers and allow them to not just work but to also have rights and be human beings, recognize their humanity. Thank you.

NOOR:Professor Gonzalez, thank you for joining us.

GONZALES:Thank you for having me. It was my pleasure.

NOOR: And thank you for joining us on the The Real News Network.

When the Government Asks, Tech Companies Usually Turn Over User Information

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:23:00 -0700

How often do technology companies hand over user information to the government? More answers to that question have come out in recent days.

Just how often do technology companies hand over user information to the government? That question has taken on renewed significance in the wake of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures. A big problem, though, is that technology companies like Facebook and Google can’t reveal many specific details about the government requests, as Mother Jones’ Dana Liebelson points out.

Snowden disclosed the existence of a program called PRISM, which, according to an NSA slide detailing the program, allowed the government “direct access” to the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and more. But the companies say that the government requests information from the companies based on a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act request, and the data is then turned over.

In the wake of this revelation, companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter asked the U.S. government to be allowed to release data on how much information they give over when asked. In response, the government said they could release information about the number of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests--but only in conjunction with information about other government agencies’ requests. In practice, this means that the information released does not reveal a whole lot about FISA requests.

Microsoft and Facebook have now released the data they are allowed to, though Google and Twitter have not and are pressing to be allowed to disclose the specific amount of FISA requests, according to Mother Jones.

This new data is in addition to information already released over the past few years by some technology companies about government requests for user information. But they can only provided limited information about what are known as national security letters--a Patriot Act-authorized demand letter to organizations or companies related to a terrorism investigation. Liebelson notes that “Google could only report that it had received as many as 999 national security letters in 2012, targeting between 1,000 and 1,999 user accounts.” Companies can’t reveal a lot about the content contained in requests turned over as a result of national security letters.

Mother Jones has some more numbers:

Last year, Google “received over 16,400 requests covering more than 31,000 user accounts from federal, state, and local authorities.”

Microsoft received 6,000-7,000 government requests for information in the second half of last year that related to 32,000 accounts.

Facebook received 9,000-10,000 government requests in the second half of last year as well, which affected 19,000 accounts.

Twitter received 1,494 government requests last year, which affected 2,093 accounts.

Those numbers include FISA requests along with state and local government requests. The companies usually hand the information over. Google granted the information to government 89% of the time; Microsoft 79% of the time; and Twitter 72% of the time. Other companies besides those have not released new data incorporating FISA requests.

In total, 64,936 users of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft were affected by government requests from July-December 2012.

5 Disturbing Takeaways from NSA Chief Keith Alexander's Hearings Today

Joan McCarter, Daily Kos — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:58:00 -0700

What we've learned from the hearings -- and we have yet to find out.

The public portion of Tuesday's House Intelligence Committee hearing with NSA chief Keith Alexander, along with other intelligence officials, has proven one thing: House oversight of intelligence activities is, if anything, less rigorous than the senate's.

What we've learned:

1. NSA chief Alexander says that the top secret surveillance programs have foiled more than 50 terrorist plots since 9/11. But we don't know yet from the first round of questioning whether any of those plots could have been foiled by legal, constitutional, regular intelligence. The officials have also not been asked about the assertion of security experts that the programs played a minor role. For example, in one of the key cases they highlight—would-be New Yorksubway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009—old-fashioned intelligence led to his arrest.

2. No one among intelligence leadership thinks that the FISA court is just a rubber stamp. The fact that the court hasn't rejected a single application, out of some 4,000, in the past two years didn't come up.

3. There are around 1,000 system administrators, like Edward Snowden, who have access to the same information as him. The majority of them are contractors.

4. Not everything discussed so far has been useless. Some of it has been downright disturbing. For example, regarding PRISM, the Internet surveillance program:

Confirmed: NSA Analyst doesn't need a separate court order to query database. Analysts can decide what is "reasonably suspicious."
— @EFFLive

That means NSA analysts get to decide and act unilaterally to extract collected information. Also, this:
Confirmed, no court review of individual queries. Rest of the checks are inside the DOJ — this is not oversight!
— @EFFLive

The FISA court that totally isn't a rubberstamp isn't even rubberstamping individual queries.
5. NSA chief Alexander says that he's never seen an NSA analyst who has that authority do anything wrong. He has a short memory apparently having completely forgotten the time an analyst illegally rooted around in Bill Clinton's email.

Thus far, the most significant revelation from this hearing is that we don't need to worry because there is totally oversight, from a congress that intelligence officials obviously feel no compunction about lying to and from a court that will give the NSA whatever it wants.

9:43 AM PT: Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) did follow up with a question about how critical the programs were to those 50 cases. The upshot in answer to that:

So: 7 years of collecting every American's records has "contributed" to maybe 10 investigations, no claim that contribution essential.
— @normative

7 Things to Know About the Draconian GOP Bill That Would Force Women to Birth Babies Without Brains

Tara Culp-Ressler, Think Progress — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:14:00 -0700

Anti-abortion zealots are getting bolder.

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives will vote on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a measure spearheaded by Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) that would cut off legal access to abortion services at 20 weeks after fertilization. It represents the most restrictive abortion bill to come to a vote in either chamber over the past decade. Here’s what you need to know about this attack on women’s reproductive rights — and how it fits into a broader, coordinated nationwide campaign to slowly chip away at abortion access:

1. It’s based on the scientifically-disputed theory that fetuses can feel pain before the third trimester of pregnancy.
So-called “fetal pain” measures are based on junk science that represents a minority position among medical professionals. Most doctors don’t believe that fetuses can feel pain until much later in pregnancy, after the point of viability (generally considered to be around 24 weeks), and scientific research has repeatedly confirmed this position. Nevertheless, abortion opponents have successfully stoked emotional outrage surrounding later-term abortion — particularly following the high-profile murder trial of illegal abortion provider Kermit Gosnell — by twisting the facts to make it appear that these abortions are always barbaric procedures.
2. It has sparked more controversy over Republicans’ attitudes toward rape.
The original version of Franks’ legislation did not include an exception for victims of rape or incest. Defending the lack of an exception in these cases, the Arizona congressman last week claimed that “the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.” Franks is just the latest Republican to make an offensive comment about rape victims, and his comments inspired comparisons to former Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) infamous assertion that women don’t often get pregnant from “legitimate rape” because the body “has ways of shutting that whole thing down.” Following the controversy that erupted from his statements, Franks revised the legislation at the last minute to include an exemption for survivors of rape and incest — but only if rape victims first report the sexual crime to the police, and if incest victims are minors.
3. Abortions after 20 weeks are already extremely rare, and the women who need them are usually in the most desperate of circumstances.
Although Franks claimed he didn’t need to legislate rape victims’ reproductive rights because the instances of pregnancies resulting from rape are “very low,” the instances of abortions after 20 weeks are actually much lower than that. Pregnancy results from rape anestimated 5 percent of the time, while abortions after 20 weeks represent just one percent of all abortions. The women who seek out this type of later abortion procedure tend to fall into one of two categories: the economically disadvantaged women who need to delay abortion until they can save up the money for it, and the women who discover serious fetal health issues only after their pregnancy has advanced. Criminalizing abortion after 20 weeks will force some women to give birth to fetuses with no brain function — or other types of fatal anomalies — and watch their children suffer outside of the womb during their short lives.
4. The national legislation initially started out as an abortion restriction for the women who live in Washington, DC.
Franks has repeatedly attempted to impose his anti-abortion agenda on the women living in the nation’s capitol. Because the District of Columbia does not have its own representation in Congress, lawmakers from other areas often use it as their legislative playground. Franks’ fetal pain measure failed last year, but that didn’t stop him from re-introducing it — and eventually expanding it to apply to women in every state. The Republican lawmaker said that Gosnell’s crimes compelled him to restrict abortion access not just for DC women, but for women across the entire country.

5. Even though a national ban has no chance of passing, 20-week bans are successfully advancing on the state level.
Franks’ 20-week ban is essentially dead-on-arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and the President has already indicated that he will veto it if it comes to his desk. But that doesn’t mean fetal pain measures are nothing to worry about. In fact, this anti-choice strategy is successfully advancing on the state level. After Nebraska first enacted a 20-week ban on abortion in 2010, a handful of other states rushed to do the same. Now, according to the Guttmacher Institute, about 11 states have banned abortion services before the point of viability specifically based on the notion that fetuses can feel pain — and more states are currently advancing fetal pain bills. Texas isconsidering a 20-week abortion ban in its special session, and anti-choice lawmakers are hoping to rush it through. GOP-led legislatures inSouth Carolina and Wisconsin also may advance fetal pain laws in the last days of their sessions.
6. “Fetal pain” laws are unconstitutional, and state-level versions have been repeatedly blocked in court.
As increasing numbers of states have enacted 20-week abortion bans, courts have blocked several of them from taking effect. Fetal pain measures effectively narrow the window during which women may exercise their constitutional rights by moving up the cut-off for legal abortion services — a direct violation of Roe v. Wade guarantees the right to legal abortion until the point of viability. Twenty-week bans inIdaho, Georgia, and Franks’ home state of Arizona have all been blocked for this reason.
7. The anti-choice movement is growing bolder, and abortion opponents are demonstrating they’re not afraid to directly challenge Roe v. Wade.
Even though the national 20-week ban has no chance of becoming law, the fact that Republicans in the House brought it to a vote illustrates the fact that abortion opponents aren’t backing down from the fight. Over the past decade, anti-abortion Republicans have relied on an “incremental” strategy to limit abortion access, passing dozens of state-level restrictions couched in terms of “women’s health and safety” rather than attempting to ban the procedure altogether. Lawmakers used to be wary to advance stringent laws that overstep Roeand are likely be struck down in court. That’s not the case anymore. This session, state legislatures have passed increasingly harsh abortion bans — like a six-week ban in North Dakota and a 12-week ban in Arkansas — and they’ve made it clear that they want to test the boundaries of Roe v. Wade. “These laws are flying through,” Elizabeth Nash, a policy analyst for the Guttmacher Institute, told the New York Times. “The attention has really been at the state level around abortion issues. Now what you also see at the federal level is very disturbing, and it shows that abortion opponents are very emboldened.”

Why Are Techies Trying to Tar Snowden and the Reporters Who Went After the Story?

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:13:00 -0700

Efforts to take down Greenwald and Snowden are ultimately destructive of the interests of American technology companies and American security.

Some Silicon Valley figures, along with some Democratic party-aligned media outlets, have tried assailing Glenn Greenwald, and indirectly, Edward Snowden, by trying to discredit certain aspects of the Guardian account of NSA surveillance in the US. Greenwald, who has an appetite for trench warfare, deigned to rebut their efforts as of last Friday. But the tech pedants’ efforts to take down Greenwald and Snowden aren’t simply petty and disingenuous, they are ultimately destructive of the interests of American technology companies and American security.

Some of the tactics used have been a bizarre combination of focusing on minutiae and straw manning. For instance, one site, Little Green Footballs, claimed that though the Guardian had said Snowden had smuggled four “confidential” laptops out, he’d in fact used a thumb drive to carry documents out of Booz. Golly gee, that means you can’t trust ANY of the rest of the story!

However, the Guardian had simply said that Snowden had four laptops with him when he first met with their reporters. The piece was silent on how exactly he extracted the data. So, using Little Green Footballs’ own logic, you should not trust one iota anything Little Green Footballs has to say on this matter, either. We similarly have the range war over the “direct access to servers” language, when anyone who read the original Guardian story would recognize that the ‘direct access’ language tracked that of a PowerPoint slide on the PRISM program, a document whose authenticity has never been denied; the story wrote up the slides. Funny how people who would have laughed at Clinton’s famed “it depends what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” were eager to use the same stick to try to beat Greenwald.

Or as Lambert has said, “Shorter tech dudes on Greenwald: The NSA slides show the servers weren’t built my way, so the slides are wrong. Also, my boss would never lie to me.”*

This front of the PR war against Greenwald, the Guardian, and Snowden is using a tactic familiar to anyone who remembers the financial crisis: that the story is a technology story, ergo, only technologists are qualified to opine on it. But that rhetorical approach (“it’s all too complicated, you just need to believe what we tell you”) was seldom used by people who were acting in good faith to unravel what had happened. It was instead used mainly by incumbents and people who wanted to preserve their relationship with them to circle the wagons.

There was at least some underlying logic for this position during the market meltdown. It was, after all, a financial crisis. By contrast, the NSA scandal is not a technology story. It is at its heart a story about surveillance, the Constitution, and whether we really have any rule of law left in the US. Technology is only an enabler, folks, although, as we will discuss, this story does have important implications for major US technology players.

This clip from The Lives of Others (which is a wonderful and important movie) will hopefully serve as a reminder:

The modern society with the most intensive surveillance, East Germany, had the Trabant as its most noteworthy home grown product. Now the technology fans may argue that the selection above proves their point, that the Stasi used the best technology they had to bug the suspect’s apartment. But they forget that the Stasi depended first and foremost on spying, meaning the active cooperation of much of the population. And as this selection shows, the effectiveness of the installation of devices could have been sabotaged by the watchful neighbor had she not been cowed into silence.

Spying and surveillance do not depend on fancy electronic toys, but devices can be helpful. Japan in the Tokugawa era hadmind-numbingly detailed sumptuary laws, which were used to maintain fine social distinctions. And they were enforced via neighbors spying on each other. This sort of intrusion was sufficiently troubling to elicit a warning from Adam Smith. He opposed having “kings and ministers…pretending to watch over the economy of private people and to restrain their expense” and advocated taxation as a less intrusive way to constrain consumption. Similarly, the use of espionage as a tool of the state considerably antedates the Industrial Revolution; for instance Francis Walsingham, a minister to Elizabeth I, had a large, organized a network of informants and snoops.

Via e-mail, Ed Harrison honed in on what is wrong with the tech company fixation:

What gets lost is that the Internet companies are largely irrelevant here. They are the equivalent of hostile witnesses for the prosecution. What is more pertinent is that the NSA had serious unfettered access at the three largest US telecom companies and have had this for years. The second thread of interest is that private companies like Booz are running large pieces of our whole intelligence operations. These are two very big problems. And I would love to see people hone in on those two areas instead of bickering over Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc
My sense is that the Internet community is up in arms because they feel unfairly maligned and this is coming from journalists and tech people who are long known to be anti-surveillance. So it’s not just a ‘shoot the messenger’ thing. It is a sort of reptilian kind of self-protection thing that’s happening where these people, as part of an industry that prides itself on being counter-culture, feel unfairly attacked by someone they believe either has an agenda or doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

It’s actually worse than Harrison depicts. Recall how the PRISM slides depict the major telecom and technology players like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo as “partners”. That’s no misnomer. Look at the business model of Google, Facebook, Yahoo. If you think ordinary customers are all that important to them, given that most of the markets they compete in are oligopolies, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. It also helps to follow the money.

The NSA, and the Department of Defense in general, have long been sponsors and funders of advanced technology. Need we say DarpaNet? Physicists and mathematicians, many of whom wind up in Silicon Valley or Wall Street, can still get an advanced education without going up to their eyeballs in student debt thanks in no small measure to government funding. The NSA is an important customer and validator of tech products. It was a big buyer of NeXt computers back in the 1990s when the NeXT was the most advanced workstation/network device. It is a big funder of open source software today. A Wall Street Journal article last week details how the NSA adopts and builds on Yahoo’s and Google’s technology:

NSA stumbled in a number of its data-collection and management efforts, particularly a program called Trailblazer, but it began to gain traction with another program, which became known as Real Time Regional Gateway, or RTRG, former officials said.
Initially deployed in Iraq, the program’s focus moved to Afghanistan in 2010, where it assembled and analyzed all the data over a 30-day period on transactions that intelligence officials could get their hands on: phone conversations, military events, road-traffic patterns, public opinion—even the price of potatoes, former officials said. Changes in prices of commodities at markets proved to be an indicator of potential for conflict, they said…
A computing and software revolution, launched in Silicon Valley a few years earlier, made sifting all that data easier. That was particularly true with the development of Hadoop, a piece of free software that lets users distribute big-data projects across hundreds or thousands of computers.
Named after a child’s toy elephant and developed at Yahoo Inc., the software reached commercial scale for Internet-wide tasks in 2008 and soon became a favored application for handling big-data demands…
Mr. Garrett now runs RTRG’s successor program, which was moved to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and renamed Nexus 7. That effort has been using Hadoop and similar software to help manage large masses of data. One of the pieces of software, called Accumulo, was developed by the NSA using technology from Google, said a person briefed on the program.

And no less than Google’s Eric Schmidt has been touting this sort of collaboration as virtuous. His 2013 book The New Digital Age, co authored with Jared Cohen of Google’s in-house think tank, Google Ideas, stated: “What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century, technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.”

An important Bloomberg article, U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms, last week cracked open the window a bit on how close these ties are. A sampling:

Some U.S. telecommunications companies willingly provide intelligence agencies with access to facilities and data offshore that would require a judge’s order if it were done in the U.S….
The extensive cooperation between commercial companies and intelligence agencies is legal and reaches deeply into many aspects of everyday life, though little of it is scrutinized by more than a small number of lawyers, company leaders and spies. Company executives are motivated by a desire to help the national defense as well as to help their own companies, said the people, who are familiar with the agreements…
In addition to private communications, information about equipment specifications and data needed for the Internet to work — much of which isn’t subject to oversight because it doesn’t involve private communications — is valuable to intelligence, U.S. law-enforcement officials and the military.
Typically, a key executive at a company and a small number of technical people cooperate with different agencies and sometimes multiple units within an agency, according to the four people who described the arrangements.

Yves here. This is why the early “I/we never heard of PRISM” denials were absurd on their face. Of course the spokescritters hadn’t heard of PRISM. Only a “need to know” group did. Back to Bloomberg:

Intel Corp. (INTC)’s McAfee unit, which makes Internet security software, regularly cooperates with the NSA, FBI and the CIA, for example, and is a valuable partner because of its broad view of malicious Internet traffic, including espionage operations by foreign powers, according to one of the four people, who is familiar with the arrangement.
Such a relationship would start with an approach to McAfee’s chief executive, who would then clear specific individuals to work with investigators or provide the requested data, the person said. The public would be surprised at how much help the government seeks, the person said…
According to information provided by Snowden, Google, owner of the world’s most popular search engine, had at that point been a Prism participant for more than a year.
Google CEO Larry Page said in a blog posting June 7 that he hadn’t heard of a program called Prism until after Snowden’s disclosures and that the Mountain View, California-based company didn’t allow the U.S. government direct access to its servers or some back-door to its data centers. He said Google provides user data to governments “only in accordance with the law.”

Notice the hiding behind the fig leaf of legality. The Wall Street Journal article on the surveillance establishment’s reliance on private sector technology included this revealing comment (emphasis ours):

As it has gathered ever more data, the government has had to develop new ways to include privacy protections by reworking legal theories

“Reworking legal theories”? In the light of John Yoo-like language-torturing statements like national intelligence director James Clapper trying to deny he’d committed perjury before Congress by trying to depict his statement as the “least untrue” he could make (um, untrue is untrue), just imagine what “reworking” amounts to. Actually, you don’t need to imagine all that much. Marcy Wheeler has done a lot of spadework on this front. For instance, a post on Saturday, PRISM: The Difference between Orders and Directives, lays out some key elements of the framework, such as it is, for the surveillance regime. Marcy highlights one element: that a considerable ambit of these programs are defined not by specific orders, but by “directives”. She quotes an Associated Press story:

Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.
By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn’t required to identify specific targets or places.
A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.
With that, the government can issue “directives” to Internet companies to turn over information.

Read that twice. Every year, the Feds draw a big line around the patch of sand in which they’d like to operate. A judge rubber stamps signs off on the program. So when the various tech companies talk about the various “orders” they’ve received, this great big enabling one that lets the government make lots of binding requests is ONLY one. And if you watched the video of Alan Grayson reviewing the Verizon order that the Guardian leaked, he stressed that it had no start date, meaning that on its face, it demanded that Verizon cough all all of the customer data going back as far in time as its records allowed.

Marcy describes how, quelle surprise, when Obama came into office, he found that the NSA had been overzealous and had been accessing far more data about US citizens at home than it should have. Marcy notes:

Remember, this overcollection was self-reported by the Obama Administration at the time, not discovered by the FISA Court. Good for the Obama Administration, though we’re trusting them at their word that the overcollection was unintentional.

But lo and behold, Obama in 2009 said he’s fixed the problem but three years later the FISA court (remember, this is the FISA court that approves 99.97% of the order requests submitted to it) said it found cases where the collection overstepped the Fourth Amendment. And that took place even with deficient oversight structures and a hand-picked-to-be-complaint FISA court in place. The court doesn’t do its own monitoring; it relies on self-scored report cards semi-annual certifications by the Department of Justice and the director of national intelligence (now our “least untrue” Clapper).

I also wouldn’t take as much comfort as some have from New York Representative Jerome Nadler’s retreat on his widely reported statement over the weekend via CNET, that Congressmen had been told in a classified briefing that the NSA could obtain the substance of a phone call based on an analyst’s decision. His spokesman walked that back on Sunday, but as NC readers pointed out, the retreat was in the formula “the Administration has reiterated that…”. And bear in mind that the CNET story also said:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence committee, separately acknowledged that the agency’s analysts have the ability to access the “content of a call.”

Similarly, the various disclosures by major tech players that are coming in the tens of thousands ranges aren’t necessarily what they seem to be. For instance, Facebook said it received, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, “9,000 to 10,000 requests from all government entities in the U.S.—local, state and federal as well as classified national security-related requests—in the second half of 2012,” supposedly on 18,000 to 19,000 individual users. But what is a request? The sweeping Verizon order published at the Guardian that kicked off this firestorm was a single request. And the New York Times reported last year that law enforcement officials were relying more on “requests” and less on actual warrants.

And please don’t try the line of argument that the technology companies are blameless, that if there was any overreach, it was the doing NSA and the FISA star chamber. What can they do besides fight some orders in secret, lose, and follow orders?

The truth is plenty. If the technology companies were really concerned, lobbying dollars would go a hell of a lot further than money spent in quixotic fights in the FISA star chamber. But where has Silicon Valley been spending its money? Let’s look at Google. It is the 8th biggest spending lobbyist in DC, outstripping defense contractor Lockheed Martin. And where does the money go? From a June 2013 story in the Atlantic:

So far the fruits of Google’s lobbying efforts have resulted in a huge win in an anti-trust case, but the company has even bigger plans to prod legislation in its own self-interest. See, back in 2010 Schmidt realized “much of the laws are written by lobbyists,” he said during The Atlantic’s Washington Idea’s Forum. Google hired and funded an army of capable policy crafters, not only to save itself from government fines that don’t even make a dent but also to help write Google-powered legislation. In the near future, that means ramped up efforts to influence immigration reform. Schmidt is part of the contentious Silicon Valley group FWD.us, which is lobbying for a very specific type of immigration reform. Google also has Molinari working on updates to the Electronic Communication Privacy Act — that pesky bill the government uses to justify spying on your Gmail without a warrant.
But in the long term, all those billions of dollars will also go toward Schmidt’s foreign policy visions, and Google’s attempts at worldwide domination outside of Washington. Along with his book, Schmidt has attempted (and so far failed) to broker diplomatic relations with foreign nations, visiting North Korea back in January and Myanmar in March.

Oh, so Google is lobbying on your behalf, right? Don’t get too excited. Their focus as far as the Electronic Communication Privacy Act is concerned is to get e-mails older than six months to require a search warrant to access them (right now, these aged e-mails require only a subpoena). That does little to restrain law enforcement officials or the NSA; its big implication is to make it harder for civil litigants (such as the SEC) to get access to e-mails in discovery. Google has spent a great deal of money in Washington beating back the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit. For Silicon Valley companies generally, their lobbying dollars go to trying to get a tax holiday so they can repatriate foreign earnings and use them to pay bonuses in dividends (that’s what they did in the last tax holiday, in 2004, so don’t believe their blather about using it to invest), on immigration policy (more HB-1 visas). And remember Google on net neutrality. It was happy to accede to a deal brokered by the FCC, so long as the telcos were required not to block Google. And perhaps I missed, it but my recollection and brief Web search shows Google was nowhere to be found in the outrage over the suicide of Aaron Swartz.

As much as the tech industry defenders may feel that they’ve scored some points in their Internet rows, they are losing the battle where it counts, in the court of public opinion. While a significant number of Americans still have no point of view on l’affaire Snowden, poll results here have been showing more and more support for his whistleblowing.

And far more important, as Ed Harrison pointed out, the tech industry loyalists seem not to grasp the real stakes in this battle. The Administration and tech industry have a full court press on to demonize Snowden and reassure the public that there is nothing to see here. But this all boils down to “trust me.” That’s also the position of the tech titans. As Evengy Morozov wrote in his review of the Schmidt/Jared book:

The goal of books such as this one is not to predict but to reassure—to show the commoners, who are unable on their own to develop any deep understanding of what awaits them, that the tech-savvy elites are sagaciously in control. Thus, the great reassurers Schmidt and Cohen have no problem acknowledging the many downsides of the “new digital age”—without such downsides to mitigate, who would need these trusted guardians of the public welfare? So, yes, the Internet is both “a source for tremendous good and potentially dreadful evil”—but we should be glad that the right people are in charge. Uncertainty? It’s inevitable, but manageable. “The answer is not predetermined”—a necessary disclaimer in a book of futurology—and “the future will be shaped by how states, citizens, companies and institutions handle their new responsibilities.” If this fails to reassure, the authors announce that “most of all, this is a book about the importance of a guiding human hand in the new digital age.” The “guiding hand” in question will, in all likelihood, be corporate and wear French cuffs.

The wee problem is of course that Obama has so often lied egregiously, well beyond previous political norms, that it’s remarkable that he has any brand equity remaining. Admittedly, his strategy has worked just fine up to now, but he’s made the mistake of relying heavily on propaganda rather than action, and then went and alienated a big chunk of his messaging apparatus by going after 20 Associated Press reporters in a widely-criticized secret phone records request. And the Democratic party stalwarts such as MSNBC, had fallen badly in the ratings before this scandal broke out. And the more the NSA appears in public, at least so far, the less convincing it becomes.

That does not mean that Obama and his fellow travelers might not eventually turn public opinion around. They still have tremendous resources at their behest. But overseas is quite another matter. US technology companies and their privacy policies already grated on the EU. China has been wary of US “openness” excuses to have its Internet vendors establish large footprints. And reassurances directed at US audiences aren’t going over so well abroad. For instance, the Chinese Army’s official newspaper attacked the PRISM program today. As recounted in the Australian (hat tip 1 SK):

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily on Sunday hit out at the US for implying that spying on citizens from other countries was justified…The remarks about the program are some of the most scathing to appear in China’s state-run press after Beijing’s refusal to make an official comment..
“US President Obama has said that PRISM is not directed at US citizens,” the article said.
“The implication is that for the purposes of US security, monitoring citizens of other countries is not a problem. This simple, overbearing logic is the frightening aspect of the PRISM program.”

The Snowden disclosures are hitting an already sore nerve hard. Richard Kline gives a recap of what is really at stake:

The position of the US spyboys, now shown redhanded as spying far over any formally granted authority on American citizens, is “You can trust us with absolute power, we’re the good guys and know what’s right.” Snowden is *systematically* destroying that plausibility by giving up evidence that the US spyboys are a) not ‘good guys,’ b) lie utterly in every utterance, c) can’t be trusted with a postage stamp, because d) they couldn’t find ‘what’s right’ to within a few parasecs using all of SETI’s resources and the Hubble’s chillun for back-up. Snowden has set out to prove that the US spy apparatus isn’t simply unconstitutional but is utterly untrustworthy.
If I was guessing, which is all that I’m doing, I would say that Snowden’s move is “You can harm me, but I’m leaving you cut off at the knees before you even start.” It’s like the situation of the French Army in the Drefuss Affair: they were able to hound their critics into exile or prison, but their own credibility never recovered, they were demonstrated as despicably abusive liars who’d hurt anyone to cover up their own treachery and incompetence. And yes, the US power apparatus really is that bad. I mean, _most are_ so that’s no surprise, but we’ve a demonstrated record over the last twenty years of being everything we claim to despise and assail others for: torturers; murderers; conquerors; looters; trafficking in racism; propping up and even creating odious quislings abusing their won peoples; megalomanic spiers; hyper-paranoid ubermenschan; completely indifferent to law, treaty, or custom; ready to frame and jail domestic critics of any of that; so deep in the chamber pot of our own hypocrisy we’ve come to take the stuff for mustard on our foot-long untruths; frequently incompetent because under a vail of pervasive secrecy accountability goes to zero. “And you _TRUST_ these guys?” Ed Snowden is saying. His move isnt to play for sympathy, it’s to irreparably damage the credibility of the securecrats. And yes, he’s managed to do much to that effect _without_ revealing any military secrets…. I don’t know whether he’ll get out of Devil’s Island intact, but one has to acknowledge he has a strategy, and it’s a well-founded one.

The best move for the technology giants would be to throw their DC dollars at getting the Department of Defense, via the NSA, out of domestic operations, as long-standing US laws prescribed, and making those strictures look plausible enough to appease America’s aggrieved foreign web product and services customers. Otherwise, the most likely outcome is the worst for them, that the security state apparatus and the Administration succeed in getting through this crisis with at most cosmetic changes to their domestic surveillance apparatus. That means the FISA star chamber remains intact. And the record of the original Star Chamber was that it went from being a useful and well-regarded part of the jurisprudence system over time to a being a potent political weapon.

The implication is clear: it’s too easy for secret courts to be abused, and the NSA’s history of whistleblowing shows that they are precisely the sort of folks who have no compunction about power grabs and deception, and that includes deceiving the America public. If the tech industry does not throw its weight decisively on the side of curbing the agency, the odds are high that the EU countries and China will exploit this spectacle to wrest control of the Internet in their countries away from the US (a long term project, mind you) and to encourage domestic champions to develop more secure devices and services. The result will be exactly what would be the opposite of professed US security interests: a balkanized and somewhat opaque Internet overseas (serves you right!) with Americans at home still subject to ongoing, escalating surveillance.

But I don’t have much hope. Americans, especially members of what passes for our elites, are unable to take a good look in the mirror. Ironically, Schmidt and Jared, in their New Digital Age book, which the New Republic reviewer Morozov called Future Schlock, had an unexpected moment of prescience in their algorithmic image generation:

Or consider their prediction that the world will soon “see its first Internet asylum seeker.” Don’t tear up just yet: “a dissident who can’t live freely under an autocratic Internet and is refused access to other states’ Internets will choose to seek physical asylum in another country to gain virtual freedom on its Internet.” I have no doubt that someone might one day try this excuse—it would hardly be the oddest reason for requesting asylum—but would any reasonable government actually grant asylum on such grounds? Of course not.

Snowden comes awfully close to this model. But perilous few among America’s tech elite appear ready to face that they are the purveyors of what is on the knife’s edge of becoming an autocratic Internet.

____
* Please don’t try the “they had a dropbox.” This was the New York Times’s account on June 7:

In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said.
The negotiations have continued in recent months, as Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with executives including those at Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Intel. Though the official purpose of those meetings was to discuss the future of the Internet, the conversations also touched on how the companies would collaborate with the government in its intelligence-gathering efforts, said a person who attended.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-bristling-co...

Notice the use of the conditional, and “discussions have continued”? There may be a plan for a dropbox, but the Times sources said they were merely under consideration.

Revealed: The 48 People Stuck in Guantanamo Forever

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:06:00 -0700

The release of the list is the first time the Obama administration has publicly named the prisoners deemed "indefinite" detainees.

For over three years, the names of Guantanamo detainees slated to be held indefinitely has been a secret. But the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, along with Yale Law students, have compelled the government to release the information for the first time.

The Herald and the students had filed a lawsuit in March asking for the list of Guantanamo detainees deemed to be too dangerous for release but who cannot be tried in court because of evidence obtained by torture, inadmissible evidence or secret intelligence. Rosenberg detailed the list in a story published yesterday.

The release of the list (see below for all the names) is the first time the administration has publicly named these 48 detainees, though two of the Afghan detainees died in Guantanamo. The men designated for being held indefinitely include people from Yemen, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and more. They were deemed to be held indefinitely as a result of a task force process that classified detainees under separate categories, including the category of being held forever.

Human rights experts say the practice of holding men indefinitely is a violation of international law. “All of the detainees should either be charged and fairly tried in federal court, or released,” Amnesty International’s Zeke Johnson told Rosenberg.

The list of indefinite detainees was released in the midst of renewed attention on the camp due to a mass hunger strike. Some of the men classified as indefinite detainees are hunger striking currently.

The names of the indefinite prisoners were also released on the heels of President Obama’s renewed vows to close the prison once and for all. But even if Obama closes the prison, his administration has indicated it plans to hold some prisoners indefinitely, even if they’re held in the U.S. As Rosenberg writes, the category of indefinite detainees arose for a number of reasons. These include the fact that evidence against some of these detainees was obtained through torture, and cannot be used in court; “insufficient evidence” to prove a crime; or military intelligence claiming that detainees had undergone training that prepared them to attack the U.S. when released.

Rosenberg also reports that the U.S. government is now saying it wants to prosecute a number of the detainees classified as indefinite prisoners. But Human Rights Watch’s Andrea Prasow noted that “many of the detainees designated for prosecution can only be prosecuted in civilian court, so unless Congress lifts the restrictions banning their transfer they are effectively ‘indefinite detainees.’”

Additionally, the administration is reportedly considering transferring 5 of the detainees on the list to Qatar in exchange for an American prisoner of war being held by the Taliban.

The Miami Herald has published the names and nationalities of Guantanamo's indefinite detainees. The numbers are each prisoners' "internment serial number."

ISN 004, Abdul Haq Wasiq (Afghanistan)

ISN 006, Mullah Norullah Noori (Afghanistan)

ISN 007, Mullah Mohammed Fazl (Afghanistan)

ISN 027, Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (Yemen)

ISN 028, Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi (Yemen)

ISN 029, Mohammed al-Ansi (Yemen)

ISN 031, Mahmud Abd Al Aziz Al Mujahid (Yemen)

ISN037, Abdel Malik Ahmed Abdel Wahab al Rahabi (Yemen)

ISN041, Majid Mahmud Abdu Ahmed (Yemen)

ISN042, Abd al Rahman Shalbi Isa Uwaydah (Saudi Arabia)

ISN044, Muhammed Rajab Sadiq Abu Ghanim (Yemen)

ISN045, Ali Ahmad al-Rahizi (Yemen)

ISN128, Ghaleb Nassar al Bihani (Yemen)

ISN131, Salem Ahmad Hadi Bin Kanad (Yemen)

ISN195, Mohammed Abd al Rahman al Shumrant (Saudi Arabia)

ISN232, Fawzi Khalid Abdullah Fahad al Odah (Kuwait)

ISN235, Saeed Ahmed Mohammed Abdullah Sarem Jarabh (Yemen)

ISN242, Khalid Ahmed Qasim (Yemen)

ISN244, Abdul Latif Nasir (Morocco)

ISN324, Mashur Abdullah Muqbil Ahmed al-Sabri (Yemen)

ISN434, Mustafa Abd al-Qawi Abd al-Aziz al-Shamiri (Yemen)

ISN441, Abdul Rahman Ahmed (Yemen)

ISN508, Salman Yahya Hassan Mohammad Rabei’i (Yemen)

ISN522, Yassim Qasim Mohammed Ismail Qasim (Yemen)

ISN552, Faez Mohammed Ahmed al-Kandari (Kuwait)

ISN560, Haji WaH Muhammed (Afghanistan)

ISN576, Zahar Omar Hamis bin Hamdoun (Yemen)

ISN579, Khairullah Said Wali Khairkhwa (Afghanistan)

ISN695, Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker Mahjour Umar (Libya)

ISN708, Ismael Ali Faraj Ali Bakush (Libya)

ISN713, Mohammed al Zahrani (Saudi Arabia)

ISN782, Awal Gul (Afghanistan) * deceased

ISN832, Mohammad Nabi Omari (Afghanistan)

ISN836, Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (Yemen)

ISN837, Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah (Yemen)

ISN838, Shawqi Awad Balzuhair (Yemen)

ISN839, Musab Omar Ali al-Mudwani (Yemen)

ISN840, Hail Aziz Ahmed al-Maythali (Yemen)

ISN841, Said Salih Said Nashir (Yemen)

ISN975, Karim Bostan (Afghanistan)

ISN1017, Omar Mohammed Ali al-Rammah (Yemen)

ISN1045, Mohammed Kamin (Afghanistan)

ISN1119, Ahmid al Razak (Afghanistan)

ISN1463, Abd al-Salam al-Hilah (Yemen)

ISN10023, Guleed Hassan Ahmed (Somalia)

ISN10025, Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (Kenya)

ISN10028, Inayatullah (Afghanistan)* deceassed

ISN10029, Muhammad Rahim (Afghanistan)

One in Three Americans is Poor — And Getting Little Relief

Jeanette Wicks-Lim, Dollars and Sense — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:47:00 -0700

A look at the U.S.'s new, but only marginally improved, poverty measure.

In 1995, a blue-ribbon panel of poverty experts selected by the National Academy of the Sciences (NAS) told us that the “current U.S. measure of poverty is demonstrably flawed judged by today’s knowledge; it needs to be replaced.” Critics have long pointed out shortcomings including the failure to adequately account for the effects of “safety net” programs and insensitivity to differences in the cost of living between different places.

The Census Bureau, the federal agency charged with publishing the official poverty numbers, has yet to replace the poverty line. However, in the last couple years it has published an alternative, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). The SPM is the product of over two decades of work to fix problems in the federal poverty line (FPL).

This new measure takes us one step forward, two steps back. On the one hand, it has some genuine improvements: The new measure makes clearer how the social safety net protects people from economic destitution. It adds basic living costs missing from the old measure. On the other hand, it does little to address the most important criticism of the poverty line: it is just too damned low. The fact that the poverty line has only now been subject to revision—50 years after the release of the first official poverty statistic—likely means that the SPM has effectively entrenched this major weakness of the official measure for another 50 years.

The 2011 official poverty rate is 15.1%. The new poverty measure presented—and missed by a wide margin—the opportunity to bring into public view how widespread the problem of poverty is for American families. If what we mean by poverty is the inability to meet one’s basic needs a more reasonable poverty line would tell us that 34% of Americans—more than one in three—are poor.

What’s in a Number?

The unemployment rate illustrates the power of official statistics. In the depths of the Great Recession, a new official statistic—the rate of underemployment, counting people working part time who want full-time work and those who have just given up on looking for work—became part of every conversation about the economy. One in six workers (17%) counted as underemployed in December 2009, a much higher number than the 9.6% unemployment rate. The public had not been confronted with an employment shortage that large in recent memory; it made political leaders stand up and pay attention.

The supplemental poverty measure had the potential to do the same: a more reasonable poverty line—the bottom line level of income a household needs to avoid poverty—would uncover how endemic the problem of economic deprivation is here in the United States. That could shake up policymakers and get them to prioritize anti-poverty policies in their political agendas. Just as important, a more accurate count of the poor would acknowledge the experience of those struggling mightily to put food on the table or to keep the lights on. No one wants to be treated like “just a number,” but not being counted at all is surely worse.

With a couple of years of data now available, the SPM has begun to enter into anti-poverty policy debates. Now is a good time to take a closer look at what this measure is all about. The supplemental measure makes three major improvements to the official poverty line. It accounts for differences in the cost of living between different regions. It changes the way it calculates the standard of living necessary to avoid poverty. And it accounts more fully for benefits from safety net programs.

Different Poverty Lines for Cost-of-Living Differences

Everyone knows that $10,000 in a small city like Utica, New York, can stretch a lot farther than in New York City. In Utica, the typical monthly cost of rent for a two-bedroom apartment, including utilities, was about $650 during 2008-2011. The figure for New York City? Nearly double that at $1,100. Despite this, the official poverty line has been the same regardless of geographic location.The supplemental poverty measure adjusts the poverty income threshold by differences in housing costs in metropolitan and rural areas in each state—a step entirely missing in the old measure.

We can see how these adjustments make a real difference by simply comparing the official poverty and SPM rates by region. In 2011, according to the official poverty line, the Northeast had the lowest poverty rate (13.2%), the South had the highest (16.1%), and the Midwest and the West fell in between (14.1% and 15.9%, respectively). With cost-of-living differences factored in, the regions shuffled ranks. The SPM poverty rates of the Northeast and South look a lot more alike (15.0% and 16.0%, respectively). The Midwest’s cheaper living expenses pushed its SPM rate to the lowest among the four regions (12.8%). The West, on the other hand, had an SPM rate of 20.0%, making it the highest-poverty region.

Updating Today’s Living Costs

Obviously, household expenses have changed a lot over the last half-century. The original formula used to construct the official poverty line used a straightforward rule-of-thumb calculation: minimal food expenses time three. It’s been well-documented since then that food makes up a much smaller proportion of households’ budgets, something closer to one-fifth, as new living expenses have been added (e.g., childcare, as women entered the paid workforce in droves) and the costs of other expenses ballooned (e.g., transportation and medical care).

The new poverty measure takes these other critical expenses into account by doing the following. First, the SPM income threshold tallies up necessary spending on food, clothing, shelter and utilities. The other necessary expenses like work-related child care and medical bills are deducted from a household’s resources to meet the SPM income threshold. A household is then called poor if its resources fall below the threshold.

These non-discretionary expenses clearly take a real bite out of family budgets. For example, the “costs of working” cause the SPM poverty rate to rise to nearly doubles that of the official poverty rate among full-time year-round workers from less than 3% to over 5%. Bringing the Social Safety Net into Focus

Today’s largest national anti-poverty programs operate in the blind spot of the official poverty line. These include programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Earned Income Tax credit (EITC). The supplemental measure does us a major service by showing in no uncertain terms how our current social safety net protects people from economic destitution. The reason for this is that the official poverty measure only counts cash income and pre-tax cash benefits (e.g., Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)) towards a household’s resources to get over the poverty line. The supplemental poverty measure, on the other hand, adds to a household’s resources near-cash government subsidies—programs that help families cover their expenditures on food (e.g. SNAP and the National School Lunch program), shelter (housing assistance from HUD) and utilities (Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP))—as well as after-tax income subsidies (e.g., EITC). This update is long overdue since the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (a.k.a., the Welfare Reform Act) largely replaced the traditional cash assistance program AFDC with after-tax and in-kind assistance.

Here are some figures for 2011 that illustrate the impact of each of twelve different economic assistance programs. Social Security, refundable tax credits (largely EITC but also the Child Tax Credit (CTC)), and SNAP benefits do the most to reduce poverty. In the absence of Social Security, the supplemental poverty rate would be 8.3 percentage points higher, shooting up from 16.1% to over 23.8%. Without refundable tax credits, the supplemental poverty rate would rise 2.8 percentage points, up to nearly 19%, with much of the difference being in child poverty. Finally, SNAP benefits prevent poverty across households from rising 1.5 percentage points. The SPM gives us the statistical ruler by which to measure the impact of the major anti-poverty programs of the day. This is crucial information for current political feuds about falling over fiscal cliffs and hitting debt ceilings.

A Meager Supplement

Unfortunately, the new poverty measure adds all these important details to a fundamentally flawed picture of poverty.

In November 2012, the Census Bureau published, for only the second time, a national poverty rate based on the Supplemental Poverty Measure: it stood at 16.1% (for 2011), just one percentage point higher than the official poverty rate of 15.1%. Why such a small difference? The fundamental problem is that the supplementary poverty measure, in defining the poverty line, builds from basically the same level of extreme economic deprivation as the old measure.

In an apples-to-apples comparison (see sidebar), the new supplemental measure effectively represents a poverty line roughly 30% higher than the official poverty income threshold for a family of four. For 2011, the official four-person poverty line was $22,800, an adjusted SPM income threshold—one that can be directly compared to the FPL—is about $30,500. Unfortunately, the NAS panel of poverty experts appears to have taken an arbitrarily conservative approach to setting poverty income threshold. Reasonably enough, NAS panel uses as their starting point how much households spend on the four essential items: food, clothing, shelter, and utilities. A self-proclaimed “judgment call,” they choose what they call a “reasonable range” of expenditures to mark poverty. What’s odd is that their judgment leans back toward the official poverty line – the measure they referred to as “demonstrably flawed.”

To justify this amount they show how their spending levels fall within the range of two other “expert budgets” (i.e., poverty income thresholds) in the poverty research. What they do not explain is why, among the ten alternative income thresholds they review in detail, they focus on two of the lower ones. In fact, one of these two income thresholds they describe as an “outlier at the low end.” The range of the ten thresholds actually spans between 9% and 53% more than the official poverty line; their recommended range for the threshold falls between 14% and 33% above the official poverty line.

Regardless of the NAS panel’s intention, the Inter-agency Technical Working group (ITWG) tasked with the job of producing the new poverty measure adopted the middle point of this “reasonable range” to establish the initial threshold for the revised poverty line. This conflicts with what we know about the level of economic deprivation that households experience in the range of the federal poverty line. In a 1999 book Hardship in America, researchers Heather Boushey, Chauna Brocht, Bethney Gunderson, and Jared Bernstein examined the rates and levels of economic hardship among officially poor households (with incomes less than the poverty line), near-poor households (with incomes between the poverty line and twice the poverty line), and not poor households (with incomes more than twice the poverty line).

As expected, they found high rates of economic distress among households classified as “officially poor.” For example, in 1996, 29% of poor households experienced one or more “critical” hardships such as missing meals, not getting necessary medical care, and having their utilities disconnected. Near-poor households experienced these types of economic crises only a little less frequently (25%). Only when households achieved incomes above twice the poverty line did the incidence of these economic problems fall substantially—down to 11%. (Unfortunately, the survey data on which the study was based have been discontinued, so more up-to-date figures are unavailable.) This pattern repeats for “serious” hardships that include being worried about having enough food, using the ER for health care due to lack of alternatives, and falling behind on housing payments. So if what we mean by poverty is the inability to meet one’s basic needs, then twice the poverty line—rather than the SPM’s 1.3 times—appears to be an excellent marker.

Let’s consider what the implied new poverty income threshold of $30,500 feels like for a family of four. (This, by the way, is about what a household would take in with two full-time minimum-wage jobs.)

This annual figure comes out to $585 per week. Consider a family living in a relatively low-cost area like rural Sandusky, Michigan. Based on the basic-family-budget details provided by the Economic Policy Institute, such a family typically needs to spend about $175 on food (this assumes they have a nearby grocery store, a stove at home, and the time to cook all their meals) and another $165 on rent for a two-bedroom apartment each week. This eats up 60% of their budget, leaving only about $245 to cover all other expenses. If they need childcare to work ($180), then this plus the taxes they have to pay on their earnings ($60) pretty much wipes out the rest. In other words, they have nothing left for such basic needs as telephone service, clothes, personal care products like soap and toilet paper, school supplies, out of pocket medical expenses, and transportation they may need to get to work. Would getting above this income threshold seem like escaping poverty to you?

For many federal subsidy programs this doesn’t seem like escaping poverty either. That’s why major anti-poverty programs like that National School Lunch program, Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) step in to help families with incomes up to twice the poverty line.

If the supplementary poverty measure tackled the fundamental problem of a much-too-low poverty line then it would likely draw an income threshold closer to 200% of the official poverty line (or for an apples-to-apples comparison, about 150% of the SPM income threshold). This would shift the landscape of poverty statistics and produce a poverty rate of an astounding one in three Americans.

Now What?

The Census Bureau’s supplemental measure doesn’t do what the underemployment rate did for the unemployment rate—that is, fill in the gap between the headline number and how many of us are actually falling through the cracks.

The poverty line does a poor job of telling us how many Americans are struggling to meet their basic needs. For those of us who fall into the “not poor” category but get struck with panic from time to time that we may not be able to make ends meet—with one bad medical emergency, one unexpected car repair, one unforeseen cutback in work hours—it makes us wonder, if we’re not poor or even near poor, why are we struggling so much? The official statistics betray this experience. The fact is that so many Americans are struggling because many more of us are poor or near-poor than the official statistics lead us to believe.

The official poverty line has only been changed—supplemented, that is—once since its establishment in 1963. What can we do to turn this potentially once-in-a-century reform into something more meaningful? One possibility: we should simply rename the supplemental poverty rates as the severe poverty rate. Households with economic resources below 150% of the new poverty line then can be counted as “poor.” By doing so, politicians and government officials would start to recognize what Americans have been struggling with: one-third of us are poor.

Sources: Kathleen Short, “The Research Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2011,” Current Population Report, U.S. Bureau of the Census, November 2012 (census.gov); Constance F. Citro and Robert T. Michael (eds.), Measuring Poverty: A New Approach, Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1995; Trudi Renwick, “Geographic Adjustments of Supplemental Poverty Measure Thresholds: Using the American Community Survey Five-Year Data on Housing Costs,” U.S. Bureau of the Census, January 2011 (census.gov).

Black Man Arrested, Put in Straight-Jacket for Wearing Saggy Pants at Airport

Jonny Bonner, Courthouse News — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:27:00 -0700

Deshon Marman claims the airline's racial animus is obvious, as only days before it had allowed a middle-aged white man to fly dressed in a bra and panties.

OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) - A young black man claims in court that U.S. Airways had him arrested and put in a straitjacket for wearing saggy pants that showed his underwear, but not "any inappropriate parts of his anatomy."

Deshon Marman sued the airline; 10 of its John and Jane Doe employees, including the pilot; the City and County of San Francisco and its police Officer Calvin Tom, in Federal Court.

Marmon, a former University of New Mexico football player, was 20 when he was arrested and straitjacketed. He claims the airline's racial animus is obvious, as only days before it had allowed a middle-aged white man to fly dressed in a bra and panties. (See below.)

"The plaintiff, Deshon Marman, is a young African-American male," he says in the complaint. "On the morning of June 15, 2011, Mr. Marman was attempting to board U.S. Airways flight no. 488 so that he could return to college at New Mexico State University. Mr. Marman had briefly returned from New Mexico to the Bay Area to attend the funeral of a close friend. His friend's death was a shock, and Mr. Marman was deeply saddened and emotionally drained when he attempted to board the plane.

"When Mr. Marman approached the gate, the U.S. Airways employee assigned to collect boarding passes loudly and unpleasantly ordered him to pull up his pants. Mr. Marman was dressed in the style common of youth today, which is to say that he was not revealing any inappropriate parts of his anatomy, the top of his underwear were visible above his loose-fitting pants. Although Mr. Marman was carrying his luggage, he did the best he could to comply with the U.S. Airways employee's orders while he maneuvered his luggage to the seat and sat down.

"While this should have ended the matter, for some inexplicable reason, the U.S. Airways employees remained unappeased. Despite the fact that plaintiff was not sitting in his seat and his pants clearly were at the height demanded by the initial employee, other airline employees began accosting Mr. Marman. This culminated in the pilot, who is Caucasian, coming to the seat and demanding that Mr. Marman (who was sitting quietly and not causing any disturbance) depart the plane.

"Mr. Marman demurred. He stated that he had done nothing wrong and was resolute to remain on the flight, as he had already missed an earlier flight. Moreover, he did not want to risk missing more classes at his university. Any issue concerning how high or low his pants were riding on his hips that day was mooted by the fact that he had pulled them up, and was now seated.

"Inexplicably, the pilot ordered the other passengers off the plane. A plain-clothes deputy from the San Mateo County Sheriff's Department then appeared. This deputy told Mr. Marman that officers were required to enforce a pilot's demand, however groundless or unreasonable the demand. The deputy promised plaintiff that if he would leave the plane, he (the deputy) would make sure Mr. Marman would get on the next flight back to Albuquerque. Although Mr. Marman felt this was unfair, he agreed to get off the plane.

"As soon as Mr. Marman reached the tunnel outside the plane, the initial deputy disappeared and several officers jumped on the plaintiff, took him to the floor, and put him in full body restraints. These restraints (which are meant for use only on persons who are being physically violent) consisted of a two-part 'straitjacket' and were extremely uncomfortable and humiliating. The officers then transported Mr. Marman to jail."

Marman spent the night in San Mateo County Jail and his family bailed him out the next day. "No charges were filed by the District Attorney's Office," he says.

Video of Marman being kicked off the plane, filmed by another passenger, is posted onYouTube . Marman remains seated and addressed the pilot as "Sir" throughout.

Marman says in the complaint: "The brutal retribution by all involved - solicited by the U.S. Airways pilot, and clearly based on the victim's race - was meted out to an innocent and unoffending young African-American man."

Marman says there is proof of this: "Just days before, the news reported that a middle-aged white man had boarded and taken a US Airways flight over the protest of several fellow passengers. Apparently, he was dressed only in women's panties and brassiere, a sheer shift over his shoulders, and shoes. An airline spokeswoman said at the time that it had 'no dress code.' This clearly demonstrates that the objections raised about the plaintiff's attire were not based on policy or airline regulations."

Marman, a star defensive back in high school, transferred to New Mexico from City College of San Francisco, which he led to back-to-back conference championships and a berth in the junior college national championship game.

He claims his unjustified arrested disrupted his college career.

"The matter burst into the news locally and elsewhere, and carried back to the campus in New Mexico, where his notoriety soon disrupted his studies and participation in the school's athletic program," the complaint states.

Marman transferred to a college in San Francisco.

He seeks punitive damages for racial discrimination, unlawful arrest and battery.

He is represented by Dennis Cunningham, of San Francisco, and Gerald Singleton, of Encinitas.

Bank of America Whistle-blower Bombshell: “We Were Told to Lie” to Rip Off Borrowers

David Dayen, Salon — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:29:00 -0700

Bank of America whistle-blowers detail horrid schemes to fleece borrowers, reward staff for foreclosures.

Bank of America’s mortgage servicing unit systematically lied to homeowners, fraudulently denied loan modifications, and paid their staff bonuses for deliberately pushing people into foreclosure: Yes, these allegations were suspected by any homeowner who ever had to deal with the bank to try to get a loan modification – but now they come from six former employees and one contractor, whose sworn statements were added last week to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts.

“Bank of America’s practice is to string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises,” said Erika Brown, one of the former employees. The damning evidence would spur a series of criminal investigations of BofA executives, if we still had a rule of law in this country for Wall Street banks.

The government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which gave banks cash incentives to modify loans under certain standards, was supposed to streamline the process and help up to 4 million struggling homeowners (to date, active permanent modifications number about 870,000). In reality, Bank of America used it as a tool, say these former employees, to squeeze as much money as possible out of struggling borrowers before eventually foreclosing on them. Borrowers were supposed to make three trial payments before the loan modification became permanent; in actuality, many borrowers would make payments for a year or more, only to find themselves rejected for a permanent modification, and then owing the difference between the trial modification and their original payment. Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner famously described HAMP as a means to “foam the runway” for the banks, spreading out foreclosures so banks could more readily absorb them.

These Bank of America employees offer the first glimpse into how they pulled it off. Employees, many of whom allege they were given no basic training on how to even use HAMP, were instructed to tell borrowers that documents were incomplete or missing when they were not, or that the file was “under review” when it hadn’t been accessed in months. Former loan-level representative Simone Gordon says flat-out in her affidavit that “we were told to lie to customers” about the receipt of documents and trial payments. She added that the bank would hold financial documents borrowers submitted for review for at least 30 days. “Once thirty days passed, Bank of America would consider many of these documents to be ‘stale’ and the homeowner would have to re-apply for a modification,” Gordon writes. Theresa Terrelonge, another ex-employee, said that the company would consistently tell homeowners to resubmit information, restarting the clock on the HAMP process.

Worse than this, Bank of America would simply throw out documents on a consistent basis. Former case management supervisor William Wilson alleged that, during bimonthly sessions called the “blitz,” case managers and underwriters would simply deny any file with financial documents that were more than 60 days old. “During a blitz, a single team would decline between 600 and 1,500 modification files at a time,” Wilson wrote. “I personally reviewed hundreds of files in which the computer systems showed that the homeowner had fulfilled a Trial Period Plan and was entitled to a permanent loan modification, but was nevertheless declined for a permanent modification during a blitz.” Employees were then instructed to make up a reason for the denial to submit to the Treasury Department, which monitored the program. Others say that bank employees falsified records in the computer system and removed documents from homeowner files to make it look like the borrower did not qualify for a permanent modification.

Senior managers provided carrots and sticks for employees to lie to customers and push them into foreclosure. Simone Gordon described meetings where managers created quotas for lower-level employees, and a bonus system for reaching those quotas. Employees “who placed ten or more accounts into foreclosure in a given month received a $500 bonus,” Gordon wrote. “Bank of America also gave employees gift cards to retail stores like Target or Bed Bath and Beyond as rewards for placing accounts into foreclosure.” Employees were closely monitored, and those who didn’t meet quotas, or who dared to give borrowers accurate information, were fired, as was anyone who “questioned the ethics … of declining loan modifications for false and fraudulent reasons,” according to William Wilson.

Bank of America characterized the affidavits as “rife with factual inaccuracies.” But they match complaints from borrowers having to resubmit documents multiple times, and getting denied for permanent modifications despite making all trial payments. And these statements come from all over the country from ex-employees without a relationship to one another. It did not result from one “rogue” bank branch.

Simply put, Bank of America didn’t want to hire enough staff to handle the crush of loan modification requests, and used these delaying tactics as a shortcut. They also pushed people into foreclosure to collect additional fees from them. And after rejecting borrowers for HAMP modifications, they would offer an in-house modification with a higher interest rate. This was all about profit maximization. “We were regularly drilled that it was our job to maximize fees for the Bank by fostering and extending delay of the HAMP modification process by any means we could,” wrote Simone Gordon in her affidavit.

It is a testament to the corruption of the federal regulatory and law enforcement apparatus that we’re only hearing evidence from inside Bank of America now, in a civil class-action lawsuit from wronged homeowners, when the behavior was so rampant for years. For example, the Treasury Department, charged with specific oversight for HAMP, didn’t sanction a single bank for failing to follow program guidelines for three years, and certainly did not uncover any of this criminal conduct. Steven Cupples, a former underwriter at Bank of America, explained in his statement how the bank falsified records to Treasury to make it look like they granted more modifications. But Treasury never investigated. Meanwhile, the Justice Department joined with state Attorneys General and other federal regulators to essentially bless this conduct in a series of weak settlements that incorporated other bank crimes as well, like “robo-signing” and submitting false documents to courts.

These affidavits, however, should return law enforcement to the case. William Wilson, the case management supervisor, alleges in his statement that this “ridiculous and immoral” conduct continued through August of 2012, when he was eventually fired for speaking up. That means Bank of America persisted with these activities for at least six months AFTER the main, $25 billion settlement to which they were a party. So state and federal regulators could sue Bank of America over this new criminal conduct, which post-dates the actions for which they released liability under the main settlement. Attorneys general in New York andFlorida have accused Bank of America of violating the terms of the settlement, but they could simply open new cases about these new deceptive practices.

They would have no shortage of evidence, in addition to the sworn affidavits. According to Theresa Terrelonge, most loan-level representatives conducted their business through email; in fact, various email communications have already been submitted under seal in the Massachusetts civil case. State Attorneys General or US Attorneys would have subpoena power to gather many more emails.

And they would have very specific targets: the ex-employees listed specific executives by name who authorized and directed the fraudulent process. “The delay and rejection programs were methodically carried out under the overall direction of Patrick Kerry, a Vice President who oversaw the entire eastern region’s loan modification process,” wrote William Wilson. Other executives mentioned by name include John Berens, Patricia Feltch and Rebecca Mairone (now at JPMorgan Chase, and already named in a separate financial fraud case). These are senior executives who, if this alleged conduct is true, should face criminal liability.

Bank accountability activists have already seized on the revelations. “This is not surprising, but absolutely sickening,” said Peggy Mears, organizer for the Home Defenders League. “Maybe finally our courts and elected officials will stand with communities over Wall Street and prosecute, and then lock up, these criminals.”

Sadly, it’s hard to raise hopes of that happening. Past experience shows that our top regulatory and law enforcement officials are primarily interested in covering for Wall Street’s crimes. These well-sourced allegations amount to an accusation of Bank of America stealing thousands of homes, and lying to the government about it. Homeowners who did everything asked of them were nevertheless pushed into foreclosure, all to fortify profits on Wall Street. There’s a clear path to punish Bank of America for this conduct. If it doesn’t result in prosecutions, it will once again confirm the sorry excuse for justice we have in America.

Texas Republican Says He Wants to Ban Abortion Because ... Fetuses Masturbate?

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:25:00 -0700

The comments came as the House of Representatives prepared to debate a bill that would outlaw all abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy.

A Texas Congressman has come out in favor of an extreme abortion ban because, according to him, male fetuses masturbate.

RH Reality Check’s Adele Stan reports that Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) said that fetuses at 15-weeks “stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?” Burgess is a former OB-GYN.

The comments came as the House of Representatives prepared to debate a bill that would outlaw all abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy. Burgess would like to see an even earlier abortion ban, at 15 weeks.

Stan reports that the scientific study underlying the GOP’s insistence that abortions should be banned because fetuses could feel pain at 20 weeks is disputed. “Major medical bodies in the United States and the United Kingdom have refuted the claim of fetal pain before the third trimester,” Stan writes.

If it passes, the abortion bill would challenge Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the U.S. While the bill has no chance of becoming law, it is meant to appease the Republican Party’s right-wing base.

Argentine Sex Workers Fight De-Humanizing Abuse with Legislation, Graffiti

Roberta Radu, The Guardian — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:48:00 -0700

Argentine sex worker union fights to change societal perceptions of prostitution and change laws that leave police harassment and brutality unchallenged.

On a Buenos Aires street corner, a Banksy-style graffiti shows a scantily clad woman leaning provocatively towards the edge of the building. Round the corner, the woman's hands reach out to a pushchair carrying a toddler. This, says the Argentine Prostitutes' Association (Ammar), is the reality of the sex trade in Argentina, where 87% of sex workers are single mothers.

The graffiti is part of a campaign led by Ammar, the first de facto trade union for sex workers in Latin America. For the past 19 years the group has been fighting to change the way society looks upon prostitution and make sex workers aware of their rights.

Ammar helped draft a bill due to be presented in the senate that would class sex workers as self-employed. If it becomes law, it would enable them to register with labour authorities, pay tax and get a pension.

"We wanted to show we are first of all women, mothers and breadwinners and then sex workers and that we need laws to protect us. Some of us chose this work and there should be a legal framework for it. We need it to end marginalisation and to empower us," Georgina Orellano, an Ammar activist and former sex worker said of the campaign.

Prostitution without pimps is legal in Argentina but Ammar activists believe the current legislation leaves sex workers exposed to police abuse because it does not establish any rights. Harassed by police officers at every corner, many women end up trapped by prostitution cartels that exploit them.

Given the growth of the illegal sex trade, Gustavo Vera, director of the Alameda Foundation, which campaigns against human trafficking, thinks such a law would be ineffective. In the past year, activists from his organisation have identified and closed down 140 brothels in Buenos Aires.

"Maybe a law like this would work in Sweden or Holland, but this is Argentina. Human trafficking is a serious issue and cartels are extremely powerful. I don't think there can be such a thing as prostitution by choice here," Vera said. "[Ammar] says prostitution can be a choice but is it really when financial circumstances push you into it?"

Orellano defends the right to choose because she considers herself and other women in the trade to be typical workers.

"There's an entire class that doesn't get to really choose. Does the maid or construction worker choose that job? Sex workers are no different. To put it bluntly, they use their hands to work, we use our body but we are all workers. It's not an easy choice but it's what we have to do."

Freelance journalist based in Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter.

When Drones Guard the Pipeline: The Militarization of Our Fossil Fuels

Winona LaDuke with Frank Molley, Honor the Earth — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:22:00 -0700

The militarization of the energy fields is not new. It’s just more apparent when it’s in a first world country.

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.

I’m in South Dakota today, sort of a ground zero for the XL Keystone Pipeline, that pipeline, owned by a Canadian Corporation which will export tar sands oil to the rest of the world. This is the heart of the North American continent here. Bwaan Akiing is what we call this land-Land of the Lakota. There are no pipelines across it, and beneath it is the Oglalla Aquifer wherein lies the vast majority of the water for this region. The Lakota understand that water is life, and that there is no new water. It turns out, tar sands carrying pipelines (otherwise called “dilbit”) are sixteen times more likely to break than a conventional pipeline, and it seems that some ranchers and Native people, in a new Cowboy and Indian Alliance, are intent upon protecting that water.

This community understands the price of protecting land. And, the use of military force upon a civilian community- carrying an acute memory of the over 133,000 rounds of ammunition fired by the National Guard upon Lakota people forty years ago in the Wounded Knee standoff. That experience is coming home again, this time in Mi’gmaq territory.

Militarization of North American Oil Fields

This past week in New Brunswick, the Canadian military came out to protect oil companies. In this case, seismic testing for potential natural gas reserves by Southwestern Energy Company(SWN), a Texas based company working in the province. It’s an image of extreme energy, and perhaps the times.

SWN exercised it’s permit to conduct preliminary testing to assess resource potential for shale gas exploitation. Canadian constitutional law requires the consultation with First Nations, and this has not occurred. That’s when Elsipogtog Mi’gmaq warrior chief, John Levi, seized a vehicle containing seismic testing equipment owned by SWN. Their claim is that fracking is illegal without their permission on their traditional territory. About 65 protesters, including women and children, seized the truck at a gas station and surrounded the vehicle so that it couldn’t be removed from the parking lot. Levi says that SWN broke the law when they first started fracking “in our traditional hunting grounds, medicine grounds, contaminating our waters.” according to reporter Jane Mundy in on line Lawyers and Settlements publication. This may be just the beginning.

On June 9, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) came out en masse, seemingly to protect SWN seismic exploration crews against peaceful protesters – both native and non-Native, blocking route 126 from seismic thumper trucks. Armed with guns, paddy wagons and twist tie restraints, peaceful protestors were arrested. Four days later the protesting continued, and this time drew the attention of local military personnel. As one Mi’gmag said, “Just who is calling the shots in New Brunswick when the value of the land and water take a backseat to the risks associated with shale gas development?”

The militarization of the energy fields is not new. It’s just more apparent when it’s in a first world country, albeit New Brunswick. New Brunswick is sort of the El Salvador of Canadian provinces, if one looks at the economy, run akin to an oligarchy. New Brunswick’s Irving family empire stretches from oil and gas to media, they are the largest employer in New Brunswick and the primary proponents of the Trans Canada West to East pipeline which will bring tar sands oil to the St. Johns refinery owned by the same family. Irving is the fourth wealthiest family in Canada, the largest employer, land holder and amasses that wealth in the relatively poor province. The Saint John refinery would be a beneficiary of any natural gas fracked in the province. In general, press coverage of Aboriginal issues is sparse there at best.

Fracking proposals have come to their territory with a vengeance, and the perfect political storm has emerged- immense material poverty (seven of the ten poorest postal codes in Canada), a set of starve or sell federal agreements pushed by the Harper administration (on first nations), and extreme energy drives.

Each fracking well will take up to two-million-gallons of pristine water and transform the water into a toxic soup, full of carcinogens. The subsistence economy has been central to the Wabanaki confederacy since time immemorial, and concerns over SWN’s water contamination have come to the province. A recent Arkansas lawsuit against SWN charges the company with widespread toxic contamination of drinking water from their hydro-fracking.

Canada is the home to 75% of the worlds mining corporations, and they have tended to have relative impunity in the Canadian courts. Canadian corporations and their international subsidiaries are being protected by military forces elsewhere, and this concerns many. According to a U.K. Guardian story, a Québec Court of Appeal rejected a suit by citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo against Montreal-based Anvil Mining Limited for allegedly providing logistical support to the DRC army as it carried out a massacre, killing as many as 100 people in the town of Kilwa near the company's silver and copper mine. The Supreme Court of Canada later confirmed that Canadian courts had no jurisdiction over the company's actions in the DRC when it rejected the plaintiffs' request to appeal. Kairos Canada, a faith-based organization, concluded that the Supreme Court's ruling would "have broader implications for other victims of human rights abuses committed by Canadian companies and their chances of bringing similar cases to our courts".

In the meantime, back in New Brunswick, a heavily militarized RCMP came out to protect the exploration crews. Opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline has many faces, from ranchers in Nebraska and Texas who reject eminent domain takings of their land for a pipeline right of way, to the Lakota nation which walked out of State Department meetings in May in a show of firm opposition to the pipeline. All of them are facing a pipeline owned by TransCanada, a Canadian Corporation.

On a worldwide scale communities are concerned about their water. In El Salvador, more than 60% of the population relies on a single source of water. In 2009, this came down to choosing between drinking water and mining. In 2009, after immense public pressure, the country chose water. It established a moratorium on metal mining permits. Polls show that a strong majority of Salvadorans would now like a permanent ban. A testament to how things can change even in a politically challenged environment.

Up in Canada’s version of El Salvador, twelve people, both native and non were arrested, some detained and interrogated by investigators by the RCMP forces on June l4, and after a day of the federal military “making their presence” felt, the people of the region have concerns about how far Canada will go to protect fossil fuels.

Here in Bwaan Akiing, I am hoping that people who want to protect the water are treated with respect. And, I also have to hope that those 7,000 plus American owned drones aren’t coming home, omaa akiing, from elsewhere to our territories in the name of Canadian oil interests.

Video by Charles LeBlanc

Winona LaDuke is the Executive Director of Honor the Earth in White Earth Reservation, MN.

Why America & China's Future Plans Are Totally Nuts

James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:32:00 -0700

Big plans for the future for the world's biggest economies will take them both further down the hole.

Societies periodically go insane. Fallacious memes sweep through a frightened and confused populace and bad things happen, bad choices get made. Two bad ideas in particular infect the American thought-o-sphere these days: 1) that non-cheap oil can keep all the rackets of consumerism going; 2) that we can offset all the quandaries of non-cheap oil with accounting fraud and debt creation.

These ideas present themselves in the places of greatest authority and influence. The president says “we have a hundred years of shale gas.” The Wall Street Journal says that an inflating Dow Jones index stands for a growing economy. My recent favorite came out of the increasingly demented New York Times on Saturday: Even Pessimists Feel Optimistic About the American Economy. Quoting an econ professor named Tyler Cowen from George Mason University The Times said:

The recent surge in domestic oil and gas production signals “the start of a new era of cheap energy,” he said, while less expensive online education programs could open the door to millions of people who have been priced out of more traditional academics.

That was a two-fer of stupidities since A) it ought to be self-evident that $90-a-barrel oil is not cheap oil, and B) that because of A, there’s unlikely to be lucrative employment for people who learn double-entry book-keeping on their laptops. In fact, anyone who actually learns math over the Internet must conclude that $90-a-barrel oil will crash all the supposedly normal operations of a consumer society, including the ability of oil-and-gas companies to get the capital investment necessary for further oil production.

None of these accredited morons seems to get the basic equation between available cheap energy — e.g. oil with a high energy-return-on-investment — and capital formation — the accumulation of wealth that can be deployed to produce more wealth-producing activity. That was only possible on the way up Hubbert’s curve. On the way down, alas, the relationship enters a Ponzi unwind of too many claims on excessive promises to pay. The net result is a society with a lower standard of living. Personally, I think it will go way lower, and way sooner than later.

The idea that online education is a sovereign tonic for economic vitality is just another gloss on the inane belief that technology can take the place of energy in the equation above. Tom Friedman, grand poobah, of The New York Times Op-Ed page is the cheerleader-in-chief for that meme, but it is accepted by virtually all authorities in business and politics, and their handmaidens in the academic chairs. As the American economy dissolves in an acid bath of capital scarcity and grievance, these idiots will be waiting for the next iPhone app that can power the electric grid — and thus all the new iPhones streaming out of the Apple factories of China into the hot little hands of nineteen-year-olds in Michigan taking “Macroeconomics” on the Kahn Academy website.

Speaking of China, The New York Times ran another humdinger over the weekend: China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities that illustrates how meshugga that society is. Such are the tragic sorrows of late-blooming techno-industrialism that China is doing exactly the opposite of what the future requires — namely, destroying the basis for small-scale local food production. But, not to put too fine a point on it, China is fucked. They are simply in the hopeless zone of population overshoot and resource scarcity. There was some loose talk in thatTimes story to the effect that China will offset all its problems by colonizing Africa (and, who knows, other lands with other resources), but it will be interesting to see how it goes on the slow boat back to Shanghai with all that bok choy rotting in the hold as it plies east out of Mombasa under an ever-hotter tropical sun.

Chinese leadership apparently thinks this is the way to go. Just as the Princeton-bred American economists think that we can all migrate onto the Web and live a virtual existence on virtual wealth with virtual energy. The manifold disappointments that societies around the world face as they discover the falsity of their own memes is already leading to a lot of dangerous mischief, which is to say armed conflict. There is potential for a lot worse.

Israel Is Stirs the Pot in Syria

Jonathan Cook, CounterPunch — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:21:00 -0700

In recent weeks Israel has moved from relative inaction to a deepening involvement in Syrian affairs.

Nazareth.

For much of the past two years Israel stood sphinx-like on the sidelines of Syria’s civil war. Did it want Bashar al-Assad’s regime toppled? Did it favour military intervention to help opposition forces? And what did it think of the increasing visibility of Islamist groups in Syria? It was difficult to guess.

In recent weeks, however, Israel has moved from relative inaction to a deepening involvement in Syrian affairs. It launched two air strikes on Syrian positions last month, and at the same time fomented claims that Damascus had used chemical weapons, in what looked suspiciously like an attempt to corner Washington into direct intervention.

Last week, based on renewed accusations of the use of the nerve agent sarin by Syria, the US said it would start giving military aid directly to the opposition.

With suspicions of Israeli meddling growing, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was finally forced last week to deny as ”nonsense” evidence that Israeli forces are operating secretly over the border.

Nonetheless, the aura of inscrutability has hardly lifted, stoked by a series of leaks from Israeli officials. Their statements have tacked wildly between threats to oust Assad one moment and denials that Israel has any interest in his departure the next.

Is Israel sending out contradictory signals to sow confusion, or is it simply confused itself?

The answer can be deduced in the unappealing outcomes before Israel whoever emerges triumphant. Israel stands to lose strategically if either Assad or the opposition wins decisively.

Assad, and before him his father, Hafez, ensured that for decades the so-called separation of forces line between Syria and Israel, after the latter occupied the Golan Heights in 1967, remained the quietest of all Israel’s borders.

A taste of what might happen should the Syrian regime fall was provided in 2011 when more than 1,000 Palestinians massed in the no man’s land next to the Golan, while Assad’s attention was directed to repressing popular demonstrations elsewhere. At least 100 Palestinians crossed into the Heights, with one even reaching Tel Aviv.

Last week, following intensified fighting between the rebels and the Syrian army over Quneitra, a town next to the only crossing between Israel and Syria, UN peacekeepers from Austria started pulling out because of the dangers.

Briefly the opposition forces captured Quneitra, offering a reminder that any void there would likely suck in Palestinian militants and jihadists keen to settle scores with Israel. That point was underlined by one Israeli official, who told the Times of London: “Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos, and the extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there.”

For that reason, the Israeli military is reported to considering two responses familiar from Lebanon: invading to establish a security zone on the other side of the demarcation line, or covertly training and arming Syrian proxies inside the same area.

Neither approach turned out well for Israel in Lebanon, but there are indications – despite Netanyahu’s denial – that Israel is already pursuing the second track.

According to the New York Times, Israel is working with Syrian villagers not allied to Assad or the opposition and offering “humanitarian aid” and “maintaining intense intelligence activity”. In an interview with the Argentinian media last month, Assad accused Israel of having gone further, “directly supporting” opposition groups inside Syria with “logistical support”, intelligence on potential targets and plans for attacking them.

If the future looks bleak for Israel with Assad gone, it looks no brighter if he entrenches his rule.

A strong Assad means Syria will continue to play a pivotal role in maintaining a military front opposed to Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. That in turn means a strong Iran and a strong Hizbullah, the Shia militia in Lebanon.

Hizbullah’s formidable record in guerrilla warfare is the main reason Israel no longer occupies south Lebanon. Similarly, Hizbullah’s arsenal of rockets is a genuine restraint on greater Israeli aggression towards not only Lebanon but Syria and Iran too.

Israel’s air strikes in early May appear to have targeted shipments through Syria of more sophisticated weaponry for Hizbullah, probably supplied by Iran. Longer range missiles and anti-aircraft systems are seen as “game-changing” by Israel precisely because they would further limit its room for offensive manoeuvres.

Israel will be equally stymied if Assad stays in power and upgrades his anti-aircraft defences with the S-300 system promised by Russia.

Either way, Israel’s much vaunted ambition to engineer an attack on Iran to prevent what it claims is Tehran’s goal of developing a nuclear bomb – joining Israel in the club of Middle Eastern nuclear-armed states – would probably come at too high a price to be feasible.

So what does Israel consider in its interests if neither Assad’s survival nor his removal is appealing?

According to some well-placed Israeli commentators, the best Israel can hope for is that Assad holds on but only just. That would keep the regime in place, or boxed into its heartland, but sapped of the energy to concern itself with anything other than immediate matters of survival. It would be unable to offer help to Hizbullah, isolating the militia in Lebanon and cutting off its supply line to Iran.

In closed-door discussions, analyst Ben Caspit has noted, the Israeli army has put forward as its “optimal scenario” Syria breaking up into three separate states, with Assad confined to an Alawite canton in Damascus and along the coast.

A long war of attrition between Assad and the opposition has additional benefits for Israel following the decision by Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to draft thousands of fighters to assist the Syrian army. Protacted losses could deplete Hizbullah’s ranks and morale, while fighting is likely to spill over from Syria into Lebanon, tying up the militia on multiple fronts.

But there is a risk here too. If Hizbullah performs well, as it did in defeating the rebels this month at the town of Qusayr, its position in Lebanon could be strengthened rather than weakened. And in that situation Assad’s debt to Hizbullah would only deepen.

Such calculations are doubtless exercising Israeli military minds.

The greatest danger of all is that yet more parties get drawn in, turning the conflict into a regional one. That would be the likely outcome if Israel chooses to increase its interference, or if the US comes good with its recent threats to increase military aid to the opposition or impose a no-fly zone over parts or all of Syria.

Either way, Israel might see the transformation of Syria in to a new mini-cold war theatre as advantageous.

However, the Israeli sphinx isn’t offering any answers quite yet.

A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.

Edward Snowden Q and A: "The US Government Destroyed Any Possibility of a Fair Trial at Home"

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:12:00 -0700

The whistleblower behind the biggest intelligence leak in NSA history answered questions about the NSA surveillance revelations.

It is the interview the world's media organisations have been chasing for more than a week, but instead Edward Snowden is giving Guardian readers the exclusive.

The 29-year-old former NSA contractor and source of the Guardian's NSA files coverage will – with the help of Glenn Greenwald – take your questions today on why he revealed the NSA's top-secret surveillance of US citizens, the international storm that has ensued, and the uncertain future he now faces. Ask him anything.

Snowden, who has fled the US, told the Guardian he "does not expect to see home again", but where he'll end up has yet to be determined.

He will be online today from 11am ET/4pm BST today. An important caveat: the live chat is subject to Snowden's security concerns and also his access to a secure internet connection. It is possible that he will appear and disappear intermittently, so if it takes him a while to get through the questions, please be patient.

To participate, post your question below and recommend your favorites. As he makes his way through the thread, we'll embed his replies as posts in the live blog. You can also follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #AskSnowden.

We expect the site to experience high demand so we'll re-publish the Q&A in full after the live chat has finished.

11.07am ET

Question:

Guardian staff

GlennGreenwald

17 June 2013 2:11pm

Let's begin with these:

1) Why did you choose Hong Kong to go to and then tell them about US hacking on their research facilities and universities?

2) How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how many different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they still exist?

Answer:

1) First, the US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime. That's not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it.
Second, let's be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the "consent of the governed" is meaningless.
2) All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

11.13am ET

Question:

Guardian staff

ewenmacaskill

17 June 2013 3:07pm

I should have asked you this when I saw you but never got round to it........Why did you just not fly direct to Iceland if that is your preferred country for asylum?

Answer:

Leaving the US was an incredible risk, as NSA employees must declare their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored. There was a distinct possibility I would be interdicted en route, so I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration.

11.17am ET

Question:

ActivistGal

17 June 2013 2:15pm

You have said HERE that you admire both Ellsberg and Manning, but have argued that there is one important distinction between yourself and the army private...

"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."

Are you suggesting that Manning indiscriminately dumped secrets into the hands of Wikileaks and that he intended to harm people?

Answer:

No, I'm not. Wikileaks is a legitimate journalistic outlet and they carefully redacted all of their releases in accordance with a judgment of public interest. The unredacted release of cables was due to the failure of a partner journalist to control a passphrase. However, I understand that many media outlets used the argument that "documents were dumped" to smear Manning, and want to make it clear that it is not a valid assertion here.

11.20am ET

Question:

D. Aram Mushegian II

17 June 2013 2:16pm

Did you lie about your salary? What is the issue there? Why did you tell Glenn Greenwald that your salary was $200,000 a year, when it was only $122,000 (according to the firm that fired you.)

Answer:

I was debriefed by Glenn and his peers over a number of days, and not all of those conversations were recorded. The statement I made about earnings was that $200,000 was my "career high" salary. I had to take pay cuts in the course of pursuing specific work. Booz was not the most I've been paid.

11.23am ET

Question:

Gabrielaweb

17 June 2013 2:17pm

Why did you wait to release the documents if you said you wanted to tell the world about the NSA programs since before Obama became president?

Answer:

Obama's campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.

11.27am ET

Question:

Anthony De Rosa

17 June 2013 2:18pm

1) Define in as much detail as you can what "direct access" means.

2) Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?

Answer:

1) More detail on how direct NSA's accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications. For at least GCHQ, the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.

Updated

at 11.41am ET

11.40am ET

Anthony De Rosa

17 June 2013 2:18pm

1) Define in as much detail as you can what "direct access" means.

2) Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?

2) NSA likes to use "domestic" as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as "incidental" collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of "warranted" intercept, it's important to understand the intelligence community doesn't always deal with what you would consider a "real" warrant like a Police department would have to, the "warrant" is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp.

Glenn Greenwald follow up: When you say "someone at NSA still has the content of your communications" - what do you mean? Do you mean they have a record of it, or the actual content?

Both. If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time - and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.

11.41am ET

Question:

HaraldK

17 June 2013 2:45pm

What are your thoughts on Google's and Facebook's denials? Do you think that they're honestly in the dark about PRISM, or do you think they're compelled to lie?

Perhaps this is a better question to a lawyer like Greenwald, but: If you're presented with a secret order that you're forbidding to reveal the existence of, what will they actually do if you simply refuse to comply (without revealing the order)?

Answer:

Their denials went through several revisions as it become more and more clear they were misleading and included identical, specific language across companies. As a result of these disclosures and the clout of these companies, we're finally beginning to see more transparency and better details about these programs for the first time since their inception.
They are legally compelled to comply and maintain their silence in regard to specifics of the program, but that does not comply them from ethical obligation. If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?

11.55am ET

Question:

MonaHol

17 June 2013 4:37pm

Ed Snowden, I thank you for your brave service to our country.

Some skepticism exists about certain of your claims, including this:

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 if I had a personal email.

Do you stand by that, and if so, could you elaborate?

Answer:

Yes, I stand by it. US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it's important to understand that policy protection is no protection - policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection - a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn't stop being protected communications just because of the IP they're tagged with.
More fundamentally, the "US Persons" protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal."

12.04pm ET

Question:

Guardian staff

Spencer Ackerman

17 June 2013 4:16pm

Edward, there is rampant speculation, outpacing facts, that you have or will provide classified US information to the Chinese or other governments in exchange for asylum. Have/will you?

Answer:

This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk "RED CHINA!" reaction to anything involving HK or the PRC, and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

12.10pm ET

Question:

Answer:

US officials say this every time there's a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.
Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.
Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

Updated

at 12.11pm ET

12.12pm ET

Question:

Mathius1

17 June 2013 2:54pm

Is encrypting my email any good at defeating the NSA survelielance? Id my data protected by standard encryption?

Answer:

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.

12.24pm ET

Question:

Answer:

Binney, Drake, Kiriakou, and Manning are all examples of how overly-harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they'll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers. If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they'll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response.
This disclosure provides Obama an opportunity to appeal for a return to sanity, constitutional policy, and the rule of law rather than men. He still has plenty of time to go down in history as the President who looked into the abyss and stepped back, rather than leaping forward into it. I would advise he personally call for a special committee to review these interception programs, repudiate the dangerous "State Secrets" privilege, and, upon preparing to leave office, begin a tradition for all Presidents forthwith to demonstrate their respect for the law by appointing a special investigator to review the policies of their years in office for any wrongdoing. There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency.

12.28pm ET

Question:

Ryan Latvaitis

17 June 2013 2:34pm

What would you say to others who are in a position to leak classified information that could improve public understanding of the intelligence apparatus of the USA and its effect on civil liberties?

What evidence do you have that refutes the assertion that the NSA is unable to listen to the content of telephone calls without an explicit and defined court order from FISC?

Answer:

This country is worth dying for.

12.34pm ET

Question:

AhBrightWings

17 June 2013 2:12pm

My question: given the enormity of what you are facing now in terms of repercussions, can you describe the exact moment when you knew you absolutely were going to do this, no matter the fallout, and what it now feels like to be living in a post-revelation world? Or was it a series of moments that culminated in action? I think it might help other people contemplating becoming whistleblowers if they knew what the ah-ha moment was like. Again, thanks for your courage and heroism.

Answer:

I imagine everyone's experience is different, but for me, there was no single moment. It was seeing a continuing litany of lies from senior officials to Congress - and therefore the American people - and the realization that that Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, wholly supported the lies that compelled me to act. Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper - the Director of National Intelligence - baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.

12.37pm ET

Follow-up from the Guardian's Spencer Ackerman:

Regarding whether you have secretly given classified information to the Chinese government, some are saying you didn't answer clearly - can you give a flat no?

Answer:

No. I have had no contact with the Chinese government. Just like with the Guardian and the Washington Post, I only work with journalists.

12.41pm ET

Question:

So far are things going the way you thought they would regarding a public debate? – tikkamasala

Answer:

Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.

12.43pm ET

Final question from Glenn Greenwald:

Anything else you’d like to add?

Answer:

Thanks to everyone for their support, and remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance.

AlterNet

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