Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.

By Marisa Taylor and Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.

President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.

The Tea Party’s Legacy of Racism

June 20, 2013

 

Exclusive: The American Right demeans racial minorities for playing the victim’s role, but today’s Tea Party is draped in “victimhood,” claiming to be the target of an African-American president and feeling threatened by the nation’s demographic shift. But racist fears have always had a home on the Right, says Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

The Republican conspiracy theory – that the White House ordered the Internal Revenue Service to persecute Tea Party groups – imploded this week with the release of a House transcript showing that the special attention resulted from bureaucratic concerns of a local IRS office, not from political repression out of Washington
.
But the manufactured IRS “scandal” is only one part of a much larger pattern of the Right falsifying both current events and national history. This false narrative then reverberates through the giant right-wing echo chamber, deceiving millions of Americans who rely on the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh for their news.

Corporatizing National Security: What It Means

by Ralph Nader

 

Privacy is a sacred word to many Americans, as demonstrated by the recent uproar over the brazen invasion of it by the Patriot Act-enabled National Security Agency (NSA). The information about dragnet data-collecting of telephone and internet records leaked by Edward Snowden has opened the door to another pressing conversation—one about privatization, or corporatization of this governmental function.

In addition to potentially having access to the private electronic correspondence of American citizens, what does it mean that Mr. Snowden—a low-level contractor—had access to critical national security information not available to the general public? Author James Bamford, an expert on intelligence agencies, recently wrote: “The Snowden case demonstrates the potential risks involved when the nation turns its spying and eavesdropping over to companies with lax security and inadequate personnel policies. The risks increase exponentially when those same people must make critical decisions involving choices that may lead to war, cyber or otherwise.”

In Major Blow To Consumers, Supreme Court Protects Mega-Corporations From Liability

By Nicole Flatow on Jun 20, 2013 at 12:10 pm

In case it wasn’t clear already, the U.S. Supreme Court hammered home Thursday morning that it will protect the rights of corporations to force arbitration over the individuals’ access to the court system at any expense.

In a 5-3 ruling with Justice Sonia Sotomayor recused, Justice Antonin Scalia eviscerated almost any opportunity small merchants have to challenge alleged monopolistic practices by American Express in their credit card agreements.

United States of ALEC, A 2013 Follow-Up

This week, Moyers & Company reports on the most influential corporate-funded political force most of America has never heard of — ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. A national consortium of state politicians and powerful corporations, ALEC presents itself as a “nonpartisan public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to increase corporate profits at public expense without public knowledge.

“All of us here are very familiar with ALEC and the influence that ALEC has with many of the [legislative] members,” says Arizona State Senator Steve Farley. “Corporations have the right to present their arguments, but they don’t have the right to do it secretly.”

There's a New Fascism on the Rise, and the NSA Leaks Show Us What It Looks Like

By John Pilger

June 21, 2013  |  In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Edward Bernays wrote: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

 

The American nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays invented the term "public relations" as a euphemism for state propaganda. He warned that an enduring threat to the invisible government was the truth-teller and an enlightened public.

In 1971, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked US government files known as The Pentagon Papers, revealing that the invasion of Vietnam was based on systematic lying. Four years later, Frank Church conducted sensational hearings in the US Senate: one of the last flickers of American democracy. These laid bare the full extent of the invisible government: the domestic spying and subversion and warmongering by intelligence and "security" agencies and the backing they received from big business and the media, both conservative and liberal.

Thomas Frank: To Galt’s Gulch They Go

Over the boom and through the bust . . .

There was a time when Atlas would frown and the world of nations would tremble. He was as mighty as Zeus and as petulant as a teenager. His wrath was irresistible, and he was easily provoked. Badmouth him and he might just drop his burden and walk away. Elect someone he didn’t approve of and he’d put a lightning bolt up your ass.

Chile learned the hard way about minding the feelings of the business-class god. In 1970 that country selected as president one Salvador Allende, a socialist of the old school who quickly set about nationalizing banks, telecom concerns, and so on. American companies naturally feared these developments and laid plans to push the country down a different path. They would withdraw investments, executives mused; they would halt purchases of Chilean goods; and they would persuade others to do the same. President Richard Nixon, who was clearly thinking along the same lines, told his CIA director to “make the economy scream.”

unfit to air

“There’s no such thing as a neutral story. But there is such a thing as an honest story.”
How did NPR end up repackaging extreme right-wing talking points into a week-long series claiming to tell the “hidden” truth about disability’s explosive growth in our recession economy? Journalist Chana Joffe-Walt says she spent six months “reporting on the growth of federal disability programs” and trying to “understand what that meant.”  She gets it almost all completely wrong, down to the beautifully-colored graphs.  Here are some clues as to why.

I.
NPR’s series on disability included an episode of “This American Life” and six days of segments on the news show “All Things Considered,” all based on research by “Planet Money” reporter Chana Joffe-Walt. She tells listeners that our country’s disability programs are a “hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.”  She concludes that the growth is due to “squishy” definitions of disability that “can end up with one person with high blood pressure who is labeled disabled and another who is not.”  The people flooding disability rolls have lost their jobs but are still capable of working, or they are children whose parents are using them to get family income. This is happening because of a “disability-industrial complex” that pushes people onto a “de facto welfare program” because that hides our real unemployment numbers, is cheaper for states, and makes some lawyers a lot of money. No one planned or intended this result, she says, and no one is really paying attention, but it threatens to bankrupt our Social Security system and drain the federal budget. Getting benefits rather than working is a “deal” that 14 million American have “chosen” for themselves. Many listeners heard all this and felt grateful for such a challenging, thought-provoking, in-depth piece.

Paul Krugman: Fight the Future

Last week the International Monetary Fund, whose normal role is that of stern disciplinarian to
spendthrift governments, gave the United States some unusual advice. “Lighten up,” urged the
fund. “Enjoy life! Seize the day!”

O.K., fund officials didn’t use quite those words, but they came close, with an article in IMF Survey
magazine titled “Ease Off Spending Cuts to Boost U.S. Recovery.” In its more formal statement, the
fund argued that the sequester and other forms of fiscal contraction will cut this year’s U.S. growth
rate by almost half, undermining what might otherwise have been a fairly vigorous recovery. And
these spending cuts are both unwise and unnecessary.

Benefit payment change hurts poor

Fees mount under debit card system

By Daniel Wagner  |  6:00 am, June 19, 2013 Updated: 3:01 pm, June 20, 2013

A government initiative aimed at saving money by eliminating paper checks is hurting some recipients of federal benefits while earning the bank that operates the program millions in fees charged to consumers.

The U.S. Treasury Department has been urging people who collect Social Security and other benefits to switch to direct deposit rather than rely on mailed checks, to save millions of dollars a year in administrative costs.

But beneficiaries without bank accounts — and even some who do have accounts — are being pressured into using prepaid debit cards offered by Comerica Bank, an effort that is shifting costs to elderly people, veterans and other vulnerable consumers.

Paul Krugman: Sympathy for the Luddites

In 1786, the cloth workers of Leeds, a wool-industry center in northern England, issued a protest
against the growing use of “scribbling” machines, which were taking over a task formerly
performed by skilled labor. “How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their
families?” asked the petitioners. “And what are they to put their children apprentice to?”

Those weren’t foolish questions. Mechanization eventually — that is, after a couple of generations
— led to a broad rise in British living standards. But it’s far from clear whether typical workers
reaped any benefits during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution; many workers were clearly
hurt. And often the workers hurt most were those who had, with effort, acquired valuable skills —
only to find those skills suddenly devalued.

How Austerity Has Failed

Martin Wolf

Austerity has failed. It turned a nascent recovery into stagnation. That imposes huge and unnecessary costs, not just in the short run, but also in the long term: the costs of investments unmade, of businesses not started, of skills atrophied, and of hopes destroyed.

What is being done here in the UK and also in much of the eurozone is worse than a crime, it is a blunder. If policymakers listened to the arguments put forward by our opponents, the picture, already dark, would become still darker.

Snowden Revelations Cast New Doubts On Intelligence Oversight Process

Brian Beutler - June 19, 2013, 6:00 AM

Depending on which elected official you asked this week or last, the revelation that the NSA regularly collects U.S. phone records, and can easily access some private content like emails and chat transcripts from Internet companies, was either no big deal, an enormous shock to the conscience, or an “I told you so” moment.

For most members who don’t serve on one of the secretive intelligence committees and aren’t among the four highest ranking officials in Congress, the scope if not the existence of the programs came as a surprise. Those members weren’t prohibited from receiving official briefings about classified collections programs. But even if they took unusual interest in the issue, they had to seek out information, without easy access to the subject-area knowledge required to decipher what they’d learned, or the authority to share it with their staffs or other elected officials. The administration didn’t volunteer information, and these members’ generally don’t have aides with top-secret security clearances, let alone expertise in signals intelligence.

Global Power Project: Identifying the Institutions of Control 

Thursday, 20 June 2013 09:41 
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy.com | News Analysis

The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today's global power oligarchy. In Part 1, which appeared last week, I provided an overview examining who and what constitute the global ruling elite – often referred to as the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC). In this second part, I will attempt to identify some of the key, dominant institutions that have facilitated and have in turn been supported by the development of this oligarchic class. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.

In an article for the journal International Sociology, William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski examined the relationship between the corporate elite and the emergence of a “transnational policy-planning network,” beginning with its formation in the decades following World War II and speeding up in the 1970s with the creation of “global policy groups” and think tanks such as the World Economic Forum, in 1971, and the Trilateral Commission, in 1973, among many others.

The function of such institutions was to help mobilize and integrate the corporate elite beyond national borders, constructing a politically “organized minority.” These policy-planning organizations came to exist as “venues for discussion, strategic planning, discourse production and consensus formation on specific issues,” as well as “places where responses to crises of legitimacy are crafted,” such as managing economic, political, or environmental crises where elite interests might be threatened. These groups also often acted as “advocates for specific projects of integration, often on a regional basis.” Perhaps most importantly, the organizations “provide bridges connecting business elites to political actors (heads of states, politicians, high-ranking public servants) and elites and organic intellectuals in other fields (international organizations, military, media, academia).”

Violence against women at epidemic proportions

Multi-country analyses spotlight a dark problem.

Monya Baker
20 June 2013

Three in ten women worldwide have been punched, shoved, dragged, threatened with weapons, raped, or subjected to other violence from a current or former partner. Close to one in ten have been sexually assaulted by someone other than a partner. Of women who are murdered, more than one in three were killed by an intimate partner.

These grim statistics come from the first global, systematic estimates of violence against women. Linked papers published today in The Lancet and Science assess, respectively, how often people are killed by their partners¹ and how many women experience violence from them². And an associated report and guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Swizerland, along with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the South African Medical Research Council in Pretoria, estimates how often women suffer sexual violence from someone other than a partner, gauge the impact of partner and non-partner violence on women’s health and advise health-care providers on how to support the victims.

Too green to be true? Researchers develop highly effective method for converting CO2 into methanol

Quebec City, June 20, 2013—Université Laval researchers have developed a highly effective method for converting CO2 into methanol, which can be used as a low-emissions fuel for vehicles. The team led by Professor Frédéric-Georges Fontaine presents the details of this discovery in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Researchers have been looking for a way to convert carbon dioxide into methanol in a single step using energy-efficient processes for years. "In the presence of oxygen, methanol combustion produces CO2 and water," explained Professor Fontaine. "Chemists are looking for catalysts that would yield the opposite reaction. That would allow us to slash greenhouse gas emissions by synthesizing a fuel that would reduce our dependence on fossil fuels."

F35 program may be unaffordable, auditor says

The most costly military program in history might wind up busting the Pentagon budget

By Richard H.P. Sia,   6:00 am, June 20, 2013   Updated: 12:28 pm, June 20, 2013

The troubled F-35 fighter jet, which is supposed to serve as the backbone of the U.S. military’s future air combat forces, may cost much more than the nation can afford, a federal auditor told a Senate panel Wednesday.

Michael J. Sullivan, acquisitions director of the Government Accountability Office, told the Senate defense appropriations subcommittee that current projections call for $316 billion in F-35 development and purchases from now through 2037, an average of $12.6 billion a year. Operations and maintenance costs alone will exceed $1 trillion over the fleet’s 35-year lifespan.

How the Transition Movement Is Spreading to Towns Across America

By Jessica Stites

June 11, 2013  |  When I set out to investigate the appeal of Transition [3], a sustainability movement that has spread to 1,105 towns in 43 countries over the past eight years, I started with what I thought was a basic question: What are “Transition Towns” transitioning to?

 

“Resilience,” I was told. “What does that mean?” I asked, thinking vaguely of steel. “The ability to absorb shocks to a system!” was the reply. Well, yes, but …? Pressed for details, Nina Winn, who runs a Transition initiative at the Institute of Cultural Affairs [4] in Chicago, said, “I don’t think there’s a conclusion. Like when a person’s trying to self-improve, it’s a constant growth. Our communities would grow to be a lot more intimate. We wouldn’t be hesitant to ask for that cup of sugar or tomato. The streets would be narrower instead of expanding; there would be fresh produce on every corner that was grown just down the street. You would see people on the street because of that—because where there’s food, there’s people.”

Court Grants Corporations Impunity to Mug Retirees

By Leo Gerard | June 11, 2013

When a kid snatches an old lady’s purse, it’s punished as a crime. But when a corporation manipulates bankruptcy law to deny thousands of retired coal miners benefits they labored their entire lives to earn, it’s endorsed by federal court.

Late last month, a bankruptcy judge sanctioned a scheme in which corporations create shill companies with a dram of assets and a sea of retiree responsibilities. Such a debt-burdened outfit quickly goes bust. Bankruptcy court, the judge said, can’t consider the intent of a company’s creation, but can approve a plan to reorganize it by betraying decades of promises to retirees.
 

‘Financialization’ as a Cause of Economic Malaise

By BRUCE BARTLETT

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform — Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

Economists are still searching for answers to the slow growth of the United States economy. Some are now focusing on the issue of “financialization,” the growth of the financial sector as a share of gross domestic product. Financialization is also an important factor in the growth of income inequality, which is also a culprit in slow growth. Recent research is improving our knowledge of financialization, which has yet to get the attention of policy makers.

According to a new article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by the Harvard Business School professors Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein, financial services rose as a share of G.D.P. to 8.3 percent in 2006 from 2.8 percent in 1950 and 4.9 percent in 1980.

Digital Blackwater: How the NSA Gives Private Contractors Control of the Surveillance State

Tuesday, 11 June 2013 12:55
By Amy Goodman, Democracy NOW! | Video

As the Justice Department prepares to file charges against Booz Allen Hamilton employee Edward Snowden for leaking classified documents about the National Security Agency, the role of private intelligence firms has entered the national spotlight. Despite being on the job as a contract worker inside the NSA's Hawaii office for less than three months, Snowden claimed he had power to spy on almost anyone in the country. "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," Snowden told The Guardian newspaper. Over the past decade, the U.S. intelligence community has relied increasingly on the technical expertise of private firms such as Booz Allen, SAIC, the Boeing subsidiary Narus and Northrop Grumman. About 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is now spent on the private sector. Former NSA Director Michael V. Hayden has described these firms as a quote "digital Blackwater." We speak to Tim Shorrock, author of the book "Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence."

Republicans to Wage 30-Year Budget War

By Jonathan Chait

Since Republicans took control of Congress in the 2010 elections, they have provoked a series of budget crises, all justified by what they claimed was the extraordinary, Greece-esque threat of a runaway budget deficit. The shrinking of the budget deficit has made it harder and harder to rationalize the hair-on-fire mania required to justify threats like refusing to raise the debt ceiling.

I’ve been wondering how Republicans in Congress would acknowledge this development. The answer seems to be: by moving the goalposts back. Waaaay back — like, another twenty years back. Manu Raju and John Bresnahan report that the latest hang-up is that Senate Republicans are demanding that budget talks use a 30-year timeline. (Keep in mind that the Senate is the “moderate” of the congressional GOP — House Republicans aren’t even talking to Obama.)

National Income: Paying Work, Not Capital

Bruce Bartlett

The most disturbing economic trend today is the falling share of national income—the total amount of money earned within the country—going to workers. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), only 61.8 percent of national income went to compensation of employees in 2012, compared with 65.1 percent in 2001. (Historically, about two-thirds of national income has gone to employee compensation, which includes wages and salaries as well as supplements such as pension contributions and health insurance.) Since the vast majority of workers are in the middle class, this means the middle class has been falling behind over the past decade at an alarming pace.

The flip side to this trend is the rising share of national income going to capital—interest, rent, dividends, and other forms of so-called unearned income. Corporate profits have risen to 14.1 percent of national income from 8.5 percent in 2001. (Historically, corporate profits have been about 9 percent of national income.)

Where Unions Went Wrong on ‘Right to Work’

Labor activists retool their tactics against the bosses.

BY Rebecca Burns

When Michigan became the 24th state in the nation to pass “right-to-work” legislation this March, local union leaders immediately swore to overturn the misleadingly named laws, which threaten unions’ solvency by letting workers who receive the benefits of union representation opt out of paying dues. In January, the state’s unions filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate right-to-work legislation, and labor has also vowed to step up campaigns against Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and other anti-union state leaders in advance of the 2014 elections.

Fox News Won’t Tell Their Viewers That A Republican Was Behind IRS Targeting

By: Jason Easley Jun. 10th, 2013

Fox News is playing editing clips of Rep. Elijah Cummings, and refusing to tell their viewers that a Republican was behind the IRS targeting of tea party groups.

[...]

On America’s Newsroom, Bill Hemmer played the last part of Rep. Cummings interview on CNN where he expresses his opinion that the case is solved without showing their viewers why he feels that way.

American Exceptionalism: Alibi of a Nation

Tuesday, 11 June 2013 09:10
By Mike Lofgren, Truthout | Op-Ed

Whenever a public figure bloviates about American Exceptionalism and the country's purported heavenly mission, one is reminded of the quip attributed to Bismarck: that divine providence looks after drunkards, fools and the United States of America. Accordingly, one is always on the lookout for anyone willing to debunk America's collective personality cult. It was therefore with hopeful expectation that I perused Patrick Smith's Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. This hope was not fulfilled. While the author makes many valid points, the book suffers from an incomplete understanding of history, and, more irritatingly, with a prose style as leaden and sententious as the architecture of Washington, D.C.'s World War II Memorial, which he describes as a metaphor for American myth-making about the past (the relevant excerpt is online here).

How do you feed 9 billion people?

EAST LANSING, Mich. — An international team of scientists has developed crop models to better forecast food production to feed a growing population – projected to reach 9 billion by mid-century – in the face of climate change.

In a paper appearing in Nature Climate Change, members of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project unveiled an all-encompassing modeling system that integrates multiple crop simulations with improved climate change models. AgMIP's effort has produced new knowledge that better predicts global wheat yields while reducing political and socio-economic influences that can skew data and planning efforts, said Bruno Basso, Michigan State University ecosystem scientist and AgMIP member.

Treatment of Mental Illness Lowers Arrest Rates, Saves Money

Research from North Carolina State University, RTI International (RTI) and the University of South Florida shows that outpatient treatment of mental illness significantly reduces arrest rates for people with mental health problems and saves taxpayers money.


“This study shows that providing mental health care is not only in the best interest of people with mental illness, but in the best interests of society,” says Dr. Sarah Desmarais, an assistant professor of psychology at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.

Christianity of the Inquisition in the US Army

Larry Wilkerson: Evangelical Christianity is spreading with official support throughout the US armed forces, including the persecution of "non-believers" - May 14, 13

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. And welcome to this week's edition of The Wilkerson Report with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. Larry was the former chief of staff for Colin Powell for many years. He teaches at the William & Mary College, often appears on The Real News. Thanks for joining us.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: Thanks for having me, Paul.

JAY: So you recently joined the board of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. Why?

Paul Krugman: The Big Shrug

I’ve been in this economics business for a while. In fact, I’ve been in it so long I still remember
what people considered normal in those long-ago days before the financial crisis. Normal, back
then, meant an economy adding a million or more jobs each year, enough to keep up with the
growth in the working-age population. Normal meant an unemployment rate not much above 5
percent, except for brief recessions. And while there was always some unemployment, normal
meant very few people out of work for extended periods.

So how, in those long-ago days, would we have reacted to Friday’s news that the number of
Americans with jobs is still down two million from six years ago, that 7.6 percent of the work force
is unemployed (with many more underemployed or forced to take low-paying jobs), and that more
than four million of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months? Well, we
know how most political insiders reacted: they called it a pretty good jobs report. In fact, some are
even celebrating the report as “proof” that the budget sequester isn’t doing any harm.

Digby: Yes Virginia, the government has lied before about spying on citizens

The revelations of this week reminded me of this story I wrote about back in the Bush years --- when most liberals were united in their opposition to these programs even as the congress did its usual rubber stamping in a "time-o-war." Then, as now, it was all about "balance."

SENATOR SAM ERVIN AND THE ARMY SPY SCANDAL OF 1970-1971: BALANCING NATIONAL SECURITY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES IN A FREE SOCIETY

Karl E. Campbell

"For the past four years, the U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States." So charged Christopher H. Pyle, a former intelligence officer, in the January 1970 edition of Washington Monthly. Pyle's account of military spies snooping on law‑abiding citizens and recording their actions in secret government computers sent a shudder through the nation's press. Images from George Orwell's novel 1984 of Big Brother and the thought police filled the newspapers. Public alarm prompted the Senate Subcommittee on Consti­tutional Rights, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, to investigate. For more than a year, Ervin struggled against a cover‑up to get to the bottom of the surveillance system. Frustrated by the Nixon Administration's misleading statements, claims of inherent executive powers, and refusals to disclose information on the basis of national security, the Senator called for public hearings in 1971 to examine "the dangers the Army's program presents to the principles of the Constitution."