Sunday, February 21, 2010
The Bankster Bailout:
Matt Taibbi: Wall Street's Bailout Hustle
"Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren't just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy - they're re-creating the conditions for another crash..."
Taking Advantage of 'Free' Trade:
What I'd like to know is how do other U.S. firms - Intel, AMD, Dell, compaq/HP, etc. behave in China. I fear they smell the opportunity to be equally repressive and thugish, just because they can. I'd be for Fair Trade legislation that makes it flatly illegal to import products that could not be legally produced in the U.S. with the same methods/practices, but I'm not holding my breath...
IT PRO (UK) - Apple using tough tactics to keep suppliers quiet?
"Manufacturers will resort to spy tricks and even violence to prevent leaks and keep on the right side of Apple's code of conduct..."
Social Networking:
BBC: PleaseRobMe website reveals dangers of social networks
"...PleaseRobMe extracts information from players who have chosen to post their whereabouts automatically onto Twitter.
'It started with me and a friend looking at our Twitter feeds and seeing more and more Foursquare posts,' said Boy Van Amstel, one of PleaseRobMe's developers.
'People were checking in at their house, or their girlfriend's or friend's house, and sharing the address - I don't think they were aware of how much they were sharing.'
Mr Van Amstel, Frank Groeneveld and Barry Borsboom realised that not only were people sharing detailed location information about themselves and their friends, they were also by default broadcasting when they were away from their own home..."
Education:
Some 30-odd years ago, a friend of mine was a student in this district, which allowed an elementary school 'art teacher to beat [him] with a yard stick.' He made me aware of this story. Even in Bush-ified America, one still needs a warrant to spy in the manner the Post story describes.
Washington Post: Pa. school official defended in webcam spy case
"A suburban Philadelphia school district accused of secretly switching on laptop computer webcams inside students' homes says it never used webcam images to monitor or discipline students and believes one of its administrators has been 'unfairly portrayed and unjustly attacked.'
The Lower Merion School District, in response to a suit filed by a student, has acknowledged that webcams were remotely activated 42 times in the past 14 months, but only to find missing, lost or stolen laptops - which the district noted would include 'a loaner computer that, against regulations, might be taken off campus,'..."
Matt Taibbi: Wall Street's Bailout Hustle
"Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren't just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy - they're re-creating the conditions for another crash..."
Taking Advantage of 'Free' Trade:
What I'd like to know is how do other U.S. firms - Intel, AMD, Dell, compaq/HP, etc. behave in China. I fear they smell the opportunity to be equally repressive and thugish, just because they can. I'd be for Fair Trade legislation that makes it flatly illegal to import products that could not be legally produced in the U.S. with the same methods/practices, but I'm not holding my breath...
IT PRO (UK) - Apple using tough tactics to keep suppliers quiet?
"Manufacturers will resort to spy tricks and even violence to prevent leaks and keep on the right side of Apple's code of conduct..."
Social Networking:
BBC: PleaseRobMe website reveals dangers of social networks
"...PleaseRobMe extracts information from players who have chosen to post their whereabouts automatically onto Twitter.
'It started with me and a friend looking at our Twitter feeds and seeing more and more Foursquare posts,' said Boy Van Amstel, one of PleaseRobMe's developers.
'People were checking in at their house, or their girlfriend's or friend's house, and sharing the address - I don't think they were aware of how much they were sharing.'
Mr Van Amstel, Frank Groeneveld and Barry Borsboom realised that not only were people sharing detailed location information about themselves and their friends, they were also by default broadcasting when they were away from their own home..."
Education:
Some 30-odd years ago, a friend of mine was a student in this district, which allowed an elementary school 'art teacher to beat [him] with a yard stick.' He made me aware of this story. Even in Bush-ified America, one still needs a warrant to spy in the manner the Post story describes.
Washington Post: Pa. school official defended in webcam spy case
"A suburban Philadelphia school district accused of secretly switching on laptop computer webcams inside students' homes says it never used webcam images to monitor or discipline students and believes one of its administrators has been 'unfairly portrayed and unjustly attacked.'
The Lower Merion School District, in response to a suit filed by a student, has acknowledged that webcams were remotely activated 42 times in the past 14 months, but only to find missing, lost or stolen laptops - which the district noted would include 'a loaner computer that, against regulations, might be taken off campus,'..."
Friday, February 19, 2010
Energy:
Autoblog Green: Consumer attitude data proves it once again: gas is too cheap in America
"...According to consumer data that Edmunds.com looked at, even the cost going up to around $3.50 isn't going to be enough. The takeaway point is that even at that price, interest in small cars, crossovers and pickups is 'relatively low.' Similarly, interest in hybrids and small cars in general is falling. With gas as cheap as it is, finding buyers for all of the more fuel efficient vehicles that the government is pushing to get made could be difficult. The problem, as so many people will tell you, is that gas is just too cheap in the U.S..."
Defending the Indefensible:
Matt Taibbi: The Best Goldman Apology Yet
"...This latest effort by Moore over at the Slate-run 'Big Money' column is absolutely hilarious. She manages to write a fairly lengthy three-page article defending Goldman without addressing a single one of the main criticisms recently leveled at the bank. The piece is a protracted exercise in goalpost-moving, as her premise is that what Goldman’s critics accuse it of is not using the power of the state to bail itself out and enrich itself at the expense of others, but of having 'designed the kind of hive mind that controls anything it touches.' According to Moore, the defense against the charge that Goldman executives have 'the kind of hive mind that can control everything that it touches' is the fact that they fared so badly in their attempts at 'controlling' government and popular opinion..."
Autoblog Green: Consumer attitude data proves it once again: gas is too cheap in America
"...According to consumer data that Edmunds.com looked at, even the cost going up to around $3.50 isn't going to be enough. The takeaway point is that even at that price, interest in small cars, crossovers and pickups is 'relatively low.' Similarly, interest in hybrids and small cars in general is falling. With gas as cheap as it is, finding buyers for all of the more fuel efficient vehicles that the government is pushing to get made could be difficult. The problem, as so many people will tell you, is that gas is just too cheap in the U.S..."
Defending the Indefensible:
Matt Taibbi: The Best Goldman Apology Yet
"...This latest effort by Moore over at the Slate-run 'Big Money' column is absolutely hilarious. She manages to write a fairly lengthy three-page article defending Goldman without addressing a single one of the main criticisms recently leveled at the bank. The piece is a protracted exercise in goalpost-moving, as her premise is that what Goldman’s critics accuse it of is not using the power of the state to bail itself out and enrich itself at the expense of others, but of having 'designed the kind of hive mind that controls anything it touches.' According to Moore, the defense against the charge that Goldman executives have 'the kind of hive mind that can control everything that it touches' is the fact that they fared so badly in their attempts at 'controlling' government and popular opinion..."
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Corporate Media:
It seems that full disclosure would weaken people's credibility. Imagine the truth playing a role in letting people form an opinion!
Sebastian Jones: The Media-Lobbying Complex
"...In a single hour, two men with blatant, undisclosed conflicts of interest had appeared on MSNBC. The question is, was this an isolated oversight or business as usual? Evidence points to the latter. In 2003 The Nation exposed McCaffrey's financial ties to military contractors he had promoted on-air on several cable networks; in 2008 David Barstow wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the New York Times about the Pentagon's use of former military officers--many lobbying or consulting for military contractors--to get their talking points on television in exchange for access to decision-makers; and in 2009 bloggers uncovered how ex-Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe had guest-hosted Countdown With Keith Olbermann while working at a large PR firm specializing in 'strategies for managing corporate reputation.'
These incidents represent only a fraction of the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news, a four-month investigation by The Nation has found. Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials--people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests--have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens--and in some cases hundreds--of appearances..."
The Bankster Heist:
Dean Baker: Obama and the 'savvy' bankers
"Last week, when President Obama was asked about the $9m dollar bonus for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, he described Blankfein as a savvy businessman, adding that Americans don't begrudge people being rewarded for success. While the White House later qualified Obama's comment about Blankfein and his fellow bank executives, it's worth examining more closely some of the ways in which Blankfein and the Goldman gang were 'savvy'.
Perhaps the Goldman gang's best claim to savvy was in buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages and packaging them into mortgage backed securities, and more complex derivative instruments, and selling them all over the world. Blankfein and Goldman earned tens of billions of dollars on these deals. The great trick was that many of the loans put into these securities were issued by banks filling in phony information so that borrowers could get loans that they would not be able to repay. But this was not Goldman's concern. They made money on the packaging and the selling of the securities.
In fact, Goldman actually recognised that many of these loans would go bad. So they went to the insurance giant AIG and got them to issue credit default swaps against many of the securities it had created. In effect they were betting that their own securities were garbage. Now that is savvy. (It says something else about the highly paid executives at AIG.)..."
Nukes:
The GOP appears to be holding hostage Energy/Cap & Trade legislation unless Obama throws the nuclear industry this bone [read: corporate welfare]. Foolishly, he gives in.
Harvey Wasserman: Obama's Atomic Blunder
"...Obama has announced some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors planned for Georgia. Their Westinghouse AP-1000 designs have been rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as being unable to withstand natural cataclysms like hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.
The Vogtle site was to originally host four reactors at a total cost of $600 million; it wound up with two at $9 billion.
The Southern Company which wants to build these two new reactors has cut at least one deal with Japanese financiers set to cash in on American taxpayer largess. The interest rate on the federal guarantees remains bitterly contested. The funding is being debated between at least five government agencies, and may well be tested in the courts. It's not clear whether union labor will be required and what impact that might have on construction costs...
...Energy experts at the Rocky Mountain Institute and elsewhere estimate that a dollar invested in increased efficiency could save as much as seven times as much energy than one invested in nuclear plants can produce, while producing ten times as many permanent jobs...
...Obama has all but killed Nevada's proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump. He has appointed a commission of nuclear advocates to "investigate" the future of high-level reactor waste. But after 53 years, the industry is further from a solution than ever.
Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has reported that at least 27 of America's 104 licensed reactors are now leaking radioactive tritium. The worst case may be Entergy's Vermont Yankee, near the state's southeastern border with New Hampshire and Massachusetts. High levels of contamination have been found in test wells around the reactor, and experts believe the Connecticut River is at serious risk..."
It seems that full disclosure would weaken people's credibility. Imagine the truth playing a role in letting people form an opinion!
Sebastian Jones: The Media-Lobbying Complex
"...In a single hour, two men with blatant, undisclosed conflicts of interest had appeared on MSNBC. The question is, was this an isolated oversight or business as usual? Evidence points to the latter. In 2003 The Nation exposed McCaffrey's financial ties to military contractors he had promoted on-air on several cable networks; in 2008 David Barstow wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the New York Times about the Pentagon's use of former military officers--many lobbying or consulting for military contractors--to get their talking points on television in exchange for access to decision-makers; and in 2009 bloggers uncovered how ex-Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe had guest-hosted Countdown With Keith Olbermann while working at a large PR firm specializing in 'strategies for managing corporate reputation.'
These incidents represent only a fraction of the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news, a four-month investigation by The Nation has found. Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials--people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests--have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens--and in some cases hundreds--of appearances..."
The Bankster Heist:
Dean Baker: Obama and the 'savvy' bankers
"Last week, when President Obama was asked about the $9m dollar bonus for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, he described Blankfein as a savvy businessman, adding that Americans don't begrudge people being rewarded for success. While the White House later qualified Obama's comment about Blankfein and his fellow bank executives, it's worth examining more closely some of the ways in which Blankfein and the Goldman gang were 'savvy'.
Perhaps the Goldman gang's best claim to savvy was in buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages and packaging them into mortgage backed securities, and more complex derivative instruments, and selling them all over the world. Blankfein and Goldman earned tens of billions of dollars on these deals. The great trick was that many of the loans put into these securities were issued by banks filling in phony information so that borrowers could get loans that they would not be able to repay. But this was not Goldman's concern. They made money on the packaging and the selling of the securities.
In fact, Goldman actually recognised that many of these loans would go bad. So they went to the insurance giant AIG and got them to issue credit default swaps against many of the securities it had created. In effect they were betting that their own securities were garbage. Now that is savvy. (It says something else about the highly paid executives at AIG.)..."
Nukes:
The GOP appears to be holding hostage Energy/Cap & Trade legislation unless Obama throws the nuclear industry this bone [read: corporate welfare]. Foolishly, he gives in.
Harvey Wasserman: Obama's Atomic Blunder
"...Obama has announced some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors planned for Georgia. Their Westinghouse AP-1000 designs have been rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as being unable to withstand natural cataclysms like hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.
The Vogtle site was to originally host four reactors at a total cost of $600 million; it wound up with two at $9 billion.
The Southern Company which wants to build these two new reactors has cut at least one deal with Japanese financiers set to cash in on American taxpayer largess. The interest rate on the federal guarantees remains bitterly contested. The funding is being debated between at least five government agencies, and may well be tested in the courts. It's not clear whether union labor will be required and what impact that might have on construction costs...
...Energy experts at the Rocky Mountain Institute and elsewhere estimate that a dollar invested in increased efficiency could save as much as seven times as much energy than one invested in nuclear plants can produce, while producing ten times as many permanent jobs...
...Obama has all but killed Nevada's proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump. He has appointed a commission of nuclear advocates to "investigate" the future of high-level reactor waste. But after 53 years, the industry is further from a solution than ever.
Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has reported that at least 27 of America's 104 licensed reactors are now leaking radioactive tritium. The worst case may be Entergy's Vermont Yankee, near the state's southeastern border with New Hampshire and Massachusetts. High levels of contamination have been found in test wells around the reactor, and experts believe the Connecticut River is at serious risk..."
Monday, February 15, 2010
Palin & The Teabaggers:
Frank Rich: Palin’s Cunning Sleight of Hand
"...The Palin shtick has now become the Republican catechism, parroted by every party leader in Washington. Their constant refrain, delivered with cynicism but not irony, is this: Republicans are the anti-big-government, anti-stimulus, anti-Wall Street, pro-Tea Party tribunes of the common folk. 'This is about the people,' as Palin repeatedly put it last weekend while pocketing $100,000 of the Tea Partiers’ money.
Incredibly enough, this message is gaining traction. Though Obama remains more personally popular than the G.O.P., Republicans pulled ahead of the Democrats in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, among others, in a matchup for the 2010 midterms.
This G.O.P. populism is all bunk, of course. Republicans in office now, as well as Palin during her furtive public service in Alaska, have feasted on federal pork, catered to special interests, and pursued policies indifferent to recession-battered Americans. And yet they’re getting away with their populist masquerade — not just with a considerable swath of voters but even with certain elements in the 'liberal media.' The Dean of the Beltway press corps, the columnist David Broder, cited Palin’s 'pitch-perfect populism' in hailing her as 'a public figure at the top of her game' in Thursday’s Washington Post..."
The Banksters Go International:
NYTimes: Wall St. Helped Greece to Mask Debt Fueling Europe’s Crisis
"Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.
As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels..."
Obama The Candidate vs Obama The President:
Michael Brenner: Obama vs. Obama
"The enigma that is Barack Obama grows day by day. Contradiction after contradiction, abrupt gear shifts, perpetual motion that never reaches a destination. 'Obscene' Wall Street bonuses suddenly transmute into well earned rewards for a good guy golfing buddy; the imperative to act boldly on the jobs crisis means placing it the callous hands of Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley of health care fame; the plotting of exit strategies from Afghanistan by 2011 becomes a 'long as we have to' occupation. All these contrapuntal reversals against a sound track of non-stop exhortation and a restless shuttling from one photo-op to another. Who is this guy, anyway?..."
The White House - Pharma Deal:
This is transparency?
Paul Blumenthal: The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal
"More than a million spectators gathered before the Capitol on a frosty January afternoon to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, who promised in his campaign to change Washington's mercenary culture of lobbyists, special interest influence and backroom deals. But within a few months of being sworn in, the President and his top aides were sitting down with leaders from the pharmaceutical industry to hash out a deal that they thought would make health care reform possible.
Over the following months, pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and executives met with top White House aides dozens of times to hammer out a deal that would secure industry support for the administration's health care reform agenda in exchange for the White House abandoning key elements of the president's promises to reform the pharmaceutical industry. They flooded Congress with campaign contributions, and hired dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders to push their case. How they did it--pieced together from news accounts, disclosure forms including lobbying reports and Federal Election Commission records, White House visitor logs and the schedule Sen. Max Baucus releases voluntarily--is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington..."
Science:
BBC News: Climate Change Scientists Losing 'PR War' to Vested Interests
"A Nobel peace prize-winning Welsh physicist says climate change scientists are losing "a PR war" against sceptics with vested interests.
Sir John Houghton said there were millions of internet references to a comment he never made which appears to to show him 'hyping up' global warming.
A poll for BBC news suggests the number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising.
Sir John believes recent news stories may have contributed to scepticism.
He told BBC Wales' Dragon's Eye programme: 'If you Google my name on the web and look for a quote, the quote you will find is one that goes like this.
'It says 'unless we announce disasters, no-one will listen,'..."
Domestic Surveillance:
To avoid being tracked, removing a cell phone's battery seems to be the only countermeasure. Some phones make this rather difficult or even impossible without voiding the device's warranty, like the iPhone.
CNET News: Feds push for tracking cell phones
"Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the "Scarecrow Bandits" that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.
FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt and Corey Duffey. A jury eventually convicted the duo of multiple bank robbery and weapons charges.
Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.
In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no 'reasonable expectation of privacy' in their--or at least their cell phones'--whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that 'a customer's Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records' that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.
Those claims have alarmed the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, which have opposed the Justice Department's request and plan to tell the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia that Americans' privacy deserves more protection and judicial oversight than what the administration has proposed..."
Frank Rich: Palin’s Cunning Sleight of Hand
"...The Palin shtick has now become the Republican catechism, parroted by every party leader in Washington. Their constant refrain, delivered with cynicism but not irony, is this: Republicans are the anti-big-government, anti-stimulus, anti-Wall Street, pro-Tea Party tribunes of the common folk. 'This is about the people,' as Palin repeatedly put it last weekend while pocketing $100,000 of the Tea Partiers’ money.
Incredibly enough, this message is gaining traction. Though Obama remains more personally popular than the G.O.P., Republicans pulled ahead of the Democrats in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, among others, in a matchup for the 2010 midterms.
This G.O.P. populism is all bunk, of course. Republicans in office now, as well as Palin during her furtive public service in Alaska, have feasted on federal pork, catered to special interests, and pursued policies indifferent to recession-battered Americans. And yet they’re getting away with their populist masquerade — not just with a considerable swath of voters but even with certain elements in the 'liberal media.' The Dean of the Beltway press corps, the columnist David Broder, cited Palin’s 'pitch-perfect populism' in hailing her as 'a public figure at the top of her game' in Thursday’s Washington Post..."
The Banksters Go International:
NYTimes: Wall St. Helped Greece to Mask Debt Fueling Europe’s Crisis
"Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.
As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels..."
Obama The Candidate vs Obama The President:
Michael Brenner: Obama vs. Obama
"The enigma that is Barack Obama grows day by day. Contradiction after contradiction, abrupt gear shifts, perpetual motion that never reaches a destination. 'Obscene' Wall Street bonuses suddenly transmute into well earned rewards for a good guy golfing buddy; the imperative to act boldly on the jobs crisis means placing it the callous hands of Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley of health care fame; the plotting of exit strategies from Afghanistan by 2011 becomes a 'long as we have to' occupation. All these contrapuntal reversals against a sound track of non-stop exhortation and a restless shuttling from one photo-op to another. Who is this guy, anyway?..."
The White House - Pharma Deal:
This is transparency?
Paul Blumenthal: The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal
"More than a million spectators gathered before the Capitol on a frosty January afternoon to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, who promised in his campaign to change Washington's mercenary culture of lobbyists, special interest influence and backroom deals. But within a few months of being sworn in, the President and his top aides were sitting down with leaders from the pharmaceutical industry to hash out a deal that they thought would make health care reform possible.
Over the following months, pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and executives met with top White House aides dozens of times to hammer out a deal that would secure industry support for the administration's health care reform agenda in exchange for the White House abandoning key elements of the president's promises to reform the pharmaceutical industry. They flooded Congress with campaign contributions, and hired dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders to push their case. How they did it--pieced together from news accounts, disclosure forms including lobbying reports and Federal Election Commission records, White House visitor logs and the schedule Sen. Max Baucus releases voluntarily--is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington..."
Science:
BBC News: Climate Change Scientists Losing 'PR War' to Vested Interests
"A Nobel peace prize-winning Welsh physicist says climate change scientists are losing "a PR war" against sceptics with vested interests.
Sir John Houghton said there were millions of internet references to a comment he never made which appears to to show him 'hyping up' global warming.
A poll for BBC news suggests the number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising.
Sir John believes recent news stories may have contributed to scepticism.
He told BBC Wales' Dragon's Eye programme: 'If you Google my name on the web and look for a quote, the quote you will find is one that goes like this.
'It says 'unless we announce disasters, no-one will listen,'..."
Domestic Surveillance:
To avoid being tracked, removing a cell phone's battery seems to be the only countermeasure. Some phones make this rather difficult or even impossible without voiding the device's warranty, like the iPhone.
CNET News: Feds push for tracking cell phones
"Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the "Scarecrow Bandits" that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.
FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt and Corey Duffey. A jury eventually convicted the duo of multiple bank robbery and weapons charges.
Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.
In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no 'reasonable expectation of privacy' in their--or at least their cell phones'--whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that 'a customer's Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records' that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.
Those claims have alarmed the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, which have opposed the Justice Department's request and plan to tell the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia that Americans' privacy deserves more protection and judicial oversight than what the administration has proposed..."
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Quid Pro Quo:
Paul Blumenthal: The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal
"More than a million spectators gathered before the Capitol on a frosty January afternoon to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, who promised in his campaign to change Washington's mercenary culture of lobbyists, special interest influence and backroom deals. But within a few months of being sworn in, the President and his top aides were sitting down with leaders from the pharmaceutical industry to hash out a deal that they thought would make health care reform possible.
Over the following months, pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and executives met with top White House aides dozens of times to hammer out a deal that would secure industry support for the administration's health care reform agenda in exchange for the White House abandoning key elements of the president's promises to reform the pharmaceutical industry. They flooded Congress with campaign contributions, and hired dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders to push their case. How they did it--pieced together from news accounts, disclosure forms including lobbying reports and Federal Election Commission records, White House visitor logs and the schedule Sen. Max Baucus releases voluntarily--is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington..."
Paul Blumenthal: The Legacy of Billy Tauzin: The White House-PhRMA Deal
"More than a million spectators gathered before the Capitol on a frosty January afternoon to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, who promised in his campaign to change Washington's mercenary culture of lobbyists, special interest influence and backroom deals. But within a few months of being sworn in, the President and his top aides were sitting down with leaders from the pharmaceutical industry to hash out a deal that they thought would make health care reform possible.
Over the following months, pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and executives met with top White House aides dozens of times to hammer out a deal that would secure industry support for the administration's health care reform agenda in exchange for the White House abandoning key elements of the president's promises to reform the pharmaceutical industry. They flooded Congress with campaign contributions, and hired dozens of former Capitol Hill insiders to push their case. How they did it--pieced together from news accounts, disclosure forms including lobbying reports and Federal Election Commission records, White House visitor logs and the schedule Sen. Max Baucus releases voluntarily--is a testament to how ingrained the grip of special interests remains in Washington..."
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
The Great Bankster Heist:
Glenn Greenwald: Wall Street owners angry with their purchase
"Political science professors could require students to read this article from today's New York Times and little else would be needed to convey the essence of the American political system. The article describes how Wall Street -- which poured massive amounts of money into the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party over the last several years, ensuring unparalleled access and influence -- is now threatening to support the Republicans if Obama keeps saying mean things about them...
...Wall Street is dissatisfied with the Democrats and the Obama administration reveals how extreme are their expectations of control of the Government...
...It's impossible to find a more loyal and attentive servant to bankers than Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. As the NYT article this morning details, Wall Street executives and their lobbyists have virtually unfettered access to the administration and to the President himself. You would think they'd be satisfied with the state of affairs in Washington. Yet so extreme are their perceived entitlements of control that even mere symbolic and rhetorical disobedience from the politicians they own -- he said some mean things about us -- creates a sense of righteous grievance: our government employees do not behave this way toward us and will be punished if it continues..."
The Banksters are already getting help from the GOP...
FactCheck.org - The Big Bank Bailout Bill?
"A third-party group, the Committee for Truth in Politics, is out with an ad blasting the House’s 'Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.' The group, which has no Web site and has made no disclosures to the Federal Election Commission, was created by a North Carolina GOP operative, according to National Public Radio, and is represented by lawyer James Bopp, who sued the FEC on the grounds that the group shouldn’t have to file any kind of spending report to that agency.
The ad has run in 35 markets in Arkansas, Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, a Kantar Media Solution.
The ad, in minute-long and 30-second versions, claims in on-screen graphics that the 'financial reform bill' amounts to '[a] new $4 trillion bailout for banks. If they fail. Again. $4,000,000,000,000.'
Does it? Not exactly. The bill (H.R. 4173), which passed the House with no Republican support, does say that 'in unusual and exigent circumstances' the Federal Reserve can, with approval from an oversight council and the secretary of the Treasury, loan money to help prop up financial entities. And such monies are capped at $4 trillion. But the Federal Reserve already had such authority — with no stipulated cap on the amount it could loan. And banks that 'fail,' as the ad says, could be dissolved by regulators, according to another provision in the bill. Any money needed for the dissolution would come from a $150 billion fund formed at least partly by fees collected from large financial institutions..."
Economics:
Paul B. Farrell: Our debt time bomb is ready to go ka-boom
"Retire? You can fuggetaboutit if the new Global Debt Time Bomb is detonated by any one of 20 made-in-America trigger mechanisms.
Yes, 20. And yes, any one can destroy your retirement because all 20 are inexorably linked, a house-of-cards, a circular firing squad destined to self-destruct, triggering the third great Wall Street meltdown of the 21st century, igniting the Great Depression II that George W. Bush, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and now President Obama have simply delayed with their endless knee-jerk, debt-laden wars, stimulus bonanzas and bailouts...
...1. Federal Budget Deficit Bomb. The Bush/Cheney wars pushed America deep into a debt hole. Federal debt limit was just raised almost 100% with Obama's 2010 budget, to $14.3 trillion vs. $7.8 trillion in 2005. The Congressional Budget Office predicts future deficits around 4% through 2020. Get it? America's debt at 84% of GDP will soon pass that toxic 90% trigger point...
...5. Global Real Estate Bomb. Dubai Tower, new 'world's tallest building' is empty. BusinessWeek warns that China's housing collapse could be worse than America's. Plus the U.S. commercial real estate bubble is now $1.7 trillion, a 'ticking time bomb' bloating 25% of bank balance sheets.
...6. Peak Oil and the Population Bomb. China and India each need 500 new cities. The United Nations estimates world population exploding 50% from 6 billion to 9 billion by 2050: Three billion more humans demanding more automobiles, exhausting more resources to feed their version of the gas-guzzling 'America Dream,'...
...15. Homeland Insecurity Bomb. Security at airports, seaports, borders, vulnerable chemical plants all increase budgets.
16. Fed/Treasury Bailout Bombs. Tax credits, loans, cash and purchase of toxic assets from Wall Street banks estimated at $23.7 trillion as new debt was shifted from too-big-to-fail Fat-Cat banks to taxpayers.
17. Insatiable Washington Lobbyists Bombs. Paulson, Goldman, Geithner, Morgan and Wall Street banks, through their lobbyists and former employees working inside now have absolute power over government spending. Democracy and voters are now irrelevant in America's new corporate-socialism.
18. Shadow Banking: The Derivatives Bomb. Wall Street wants no regulation of this $670 trillion, high-risk, out-of-control casino that's highly leveraged versus the $50 trillion total GDP of all nations. We forget that derivatives almost destroyed global economies in 2008-09, finally will by 2012..."
News.com (AUS) Secret summit of top bankers
"The world's top central bankers began arriving in Australia yesterday as renewed fears about the strength of the global economic recovery gripped world share markets.
Representatives from 24 central banks and monetary authorities including the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank landed in Sydney to meet tomorrow at a secret location, the Herald Sun reports.
Organised by the Bank for International Settlements last year, the two-day talks are shrouded in secrecy with high-level security believed to have been invoked by law enforcement agencies..."
One Nation Under Surveillance:
CNET News: Police want backdoor to Web users' private data
"Anyone with an e-mail account likely knows that police can peek inside it if they have a paper search warrant.
But cybercrime investigators are frustrated by the speed of traditional methods of faxing, mailing, or e-mailing companies these documents. They're pushing for the creation of a national Web interface linking police computers with those of Internet and e-mail providers so requests can be sent and received electronically.
CNET has reviewed a survey scheduled to be released at a federal task force meeting on Thursday, which says that law enforcement agencies are virtually unanimous in calling for such an interface to be created. Eighty-nine percent of police surveyed, it says, want to be able to 'exchange legal process requests and responses to legal process' through an encrypted, police-only 'nationwide computer network.,'..."
Washington Post: Google to enlist NSA to help it ward off cyberattacks
"The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.
Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google -- and its users -- from future attack.
Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google's policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans' online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users' searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data..."
Glenn Greenwald: Wall Street owners angry with their purchase
"Political science professors could require students to read this article from today's New York Times and little else would be needed to convey the essence of the American political system. The article describes how Wall Street -- which poured massive amounts of money into the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party over the last several years, ensuring unparalleled access and influence -- is now threatening to support the Republicans if Obama keeps saying mean things about them...
...Wall Street is dissatisfied with the Democrats and the Obama administration reveals how extreme are their expectations of control of the Government...
...It's impossible to find a more loyal and attentive servant to bankers than Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. As the NYT article this morning details, Wall Street executives and their lobbyists have virtually unfettered access to the administration and to the President himself. You would think they'd be satisfied with the state of affairs in Washington. Yet so extreme are their perceived entitlements of control that even mere symbolic and rhetorical disobedience from the politicians they own -- he said some mean things about us -- creates a sense of righteous grievance: our government employees do not behave this way toward us and will be punished if it continues..."
The Banksters are already getting help from the GOP...
FactCheck.org - The Big Bank Bailout Bill?
"A third-party group, the Committee for Truth in Politics, is out with an ad blasting the House’s 'Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.' The group, which has no Web site and has made no disclosures to the Federal Election Commission, was created by a North Carolina GOP operative, according to National Public Radio, and is represented by lawyer James Bopp, who sued the FEC on the grounds that the group shouldn’t have to file any kind of spending report to that agency.
The ad has run in 35 markets in Arkansas, Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, a Kantar Media Solution.
The ad, in minute-long and 30-second versions, claims in on-screen graphics that the 'financial reform bill' amounts to '[a] new $4 trillion bailout for banks. If they fail. Again. $4,000,000,000,000.'
Does it? Not exactly. The bill (H.R. 4173), which passed the House with no Republican support, does say that 'in unusual and exigent circumstances' the Federal Reserve can, with approval from an oversight council and the secretary of the Treasury, loan money to help prop up financial entities. And such monies are capped at $4 trillion. But the Federal Reserve already had such authority — with no stipulated cap on the amount it could loan. And banks that 'fail,' as the ad says, could be dissolved by regulators, according to another provision in the bill. Any money needed for the dissolution would come from a $150 billion fund formed at least partly by fees collected from large financial institutions..."
Economics:
Paul B. Farrell: Our debt time bomb is ready to go ka-boom
"Retire? You can fuggetaboutit if the new Global Debt Time Bomb is detonated by any one of 20 made-in-America trigger mechanisms.
Yes, 20. And yes, any one can destroy your retirement because all 20 are inexorably linked, a house-of-cards, a circular firing squad destined to self-destruct, triggering the third great Wall Street meltdown of the 21st century, igniting the Great Depression II that George W. Bush, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and now President Obama have simply delayed with their endless knee-jerk, debt-laden wars, stimulus bonanzas and bailouts...
...1. Federal Budget Deficit Bomb. The Bush/Cheney wars pushed America deep into a debt hole. Federal debt limit was just raised almost 100% with Obama's 2010 budget, to $14.3 trillion vs. $7.8 trillion in 2005. The Congressional Budget Office predicts future deficits around 4% through 2020. Get it? America's debt at 84% of GDP will soon pass that toxic 90% trigger point...
...5. Global Real Estate Bomb. Dubai Tower, new 'world's tallest building' is empty. BusinessWeek warns that China's housing collapse could be worse than America's. Plus the U.S. commercial real estate bubble is now $1.7 trillion, a 'ticking time bomb' bloating 25% of bank balance sheets.
...6. Peak Oil and the Population Bomb. China and India each need 500 new cities. The United Nations estimates world population exploding 50% from 6 billion to 9 billion by 2050: Three billion more humans demanding more automobiles, exhausting more resources to feed their version of the gas-guzzling 'America Dream,'...
...15. Homeland Insecurity Bomb. Security at airports, seaports, borders, vulnerable chemical plants all increase budgets.
16. Fed/Treasury Bailout Bombs. Tax credits, loans, cash and purchase of toxic assets from Wall Street banks estimated at $23.7 trillion as new debt was shifted from too-big-to-fail Fat-Cat banks to taxpayers.
17. Insatiable Washington Lobbyists Bombs. Paulson, Goldman, Geithner, Morgan and Wall Street banks, through their lobbyists and former employees working inside now have absolute power over government spending. Democracy and voters are now irrelevant in America's new corporate-socialism.
18. Shadow Banking: The Derivatives Bomb. Wall Street wants no regulation of this $670 trillion, high-risk, out-of-control casino that's highly leveraged versus the $50 trillion total GDP of all nations. We forget that derivatives almost destroyed global economies in 2008-09, finally will by 2012..."
News.com (AUS) Secret summit of top bankers
"The world's top central bankers began arriving in Australia yesterday as renewed fears about the strength of the global economic recovery gripped world share markets.
Representatives from 24 central banks and monetary authorities including the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank landed in Sydney to meet tomorrow at a secret location, the Herald Sun reports.
Organised by the Bank for International Settlements last year, the two-day talks are shrouded in secrecy with high-level security believed to have been invoked by law enforcement agencies..."
One Nation Under Surveillance:
CNET News: Police want backdoor to Web users' private data
"Anyone with an e-mail account likely knows that police can peek inside it if they have a paper search warrant.
But cybercrime investigators are frustrated by the speed of traditional methods of faxing, mailing, or e-mailing companies these documents. They're pushing for the creation of a national Web interface linking police computers with those of Internet and e-mail providers so requests can be sent and received electronically.
CNET has reviewed a survey scheduled to be released at a federal task force meeting on Thursday, which says that law enforcement agencies are virtually unanimous in calling for such an interface to be created. Eighty-nine percent of police surveyed, it says, want to be able to 'exchange legal process requests and responses to legal process' through an encrypted, police-only 'nationwide computer network.,'..."
Washington Post: Google to enlist NSA to help it ward off cyberattacks
"The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.
Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google -- and its users -- from future attack.
Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google's policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans' online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users' searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data..."
Thursday, February 04, 2010
The Fourth Estate:
Compare the piece below by two journalism scholars with the self-serving monopoly-seeking drivel from FOX/Wall St. Journal owner Rupert Murdoch, complaining how 'unfair' the media ownership laws are. For him, the corporate pressure to extract high profit from the journalism business is the necessary and proper state of things, even if it lowers the standard. What this country's people deserve is for journalism, especially investigative journalism, to be treated as a public good. Without good information, the People in a democracy have no way to make good decisions. In the UK, the People fund the BBC. Here in the U.S., NPR has to plead for ever-increasing amounts of corporate money to stay afloat. When advertising/sponsorship money drives what a news organization is willing to report about their sponsors, journalism is effectively broken.
John Nichols & Robert McChesney: The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers
"...The place to begin crafting solutions is with the understanding that the economic downturn did not cause the crisis in journalism; nor did the Internet. The economic collapse and Internet have greatly accentuated and accelerated a process that can be traced back to the 1970s, when corporate ownership and consolidation of newspapers took off. It was then that managers began to balance their books and to satisfy the demand from investors for ever-increasing returns by cutting journalists and shutting news bureaus. Go back and read a daily newspaper published in a medium-size American city in the 1960s, and you will be awed by the rich mix of international, national and local news coverage and by the frequency with which 'outsiders'--civil rights campaigners, antiwar activists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader--ended up on the front page.
As long ago as the late 1980s and early 1990s, prominent journalists and editors like Jim Squires were quitting the field in disgust at the contempt corporate management displayed toward journalism. Print advertising, which still accounts for the lion's share of newspaper revenue, declined gently as a percentage of all ad spending from 1950 to '90, as television grew in importance. Starting in 1990, well before the rise of the web as a competitor for ad dollars, newspaper ad revenues went into a sharp decline, from 26 percent of all media advertising that year to what will likely be around 10 percent this year.
Even before that decline, newspaper owners were choosing short-term profits over long-term viability. As far back as 1983, legendary reporter Ben Bagdikian warned publishers that if they continued to water down their journalism and replace it with (less expensive) fluff, they would undermine their raison d'être and fail to cultivate younger readers. But corporate newspaper owners abandoned any responsibility to maintain the franchise. When the Internet came along, newspapers were already heading due south..."
Compare the piece below by two journalism scholars with the self-serving monopoly-seeking drivel from FOX/Wall St. Journal owner Rupert Murdoch, complaining how 'unfair' the media ownership laws are. For him, the corporate pressure to extract high profit from the journalism business is the necessary and proper state of things, even if it lowers the standard. What this country's people deserve is for journalism, especially investigative journalism, to be treated as a public good. Without good information, the People in a democracy have no way to make good decisions. In the UK, the People fund the BBC. Here in the U.S., NPR has to plead for ever-increasing amounts of corporate money to stay afloat. When advertising/sponsorship money drives what a news organization is willing to report about their sponsors, journalism is effectively broken.
John Nichols & Robert McChesney: The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers
"...The place to begin crafting solutions is with the understanding that the economic downturn did not cause the crisis in journalism; nor did the Internet. The economic collapse and Internet have greatly accentuated and accelerated a process that can be traced back to the 1970s, when corporate ownership and consolidation of newspapers took off. It was then that managers began to balance their books and to satisfy the demand from investors for ever-increasing returns by cutting journalists and shutting news bureaus. Go back and read a daily newspaper published in a medium-size American city in the 1960s, and you will be awed by the rich mix of international, national and local news coverage and by the frequency with which 'outsiders'--civil rights campaigners, antiwar activists and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader--ended up on the front page.
As long ago as the late 1980s and early 1990s, prominent journalists and editors like Jim Squires were quitting the field in disgust at the contempt corporate management displayed toward journalism. Print advertising, which still accounts for the lion's share of newspaper revenue, declined gently as a percentage of all ad spending from 1950 to '90, as television grew in importance. Starting in 1990, well before the rise of the web as a competitor for ad dollars, newspaper ad revenues went into a sharp decline, from 26 percent of all media advertising that year to what will likely be around 10 percent this year.
Even before that decline, newspaper owners were choosing short-term profits over long-term viability. As far back as 1983, legendary reporter Ben Bagdikian warned publishers that if they continued to water down their journalism and replace it with (less expensive) fluff, they would undermine their raison d'être and fail to cultivate younger readers. But corporate newspaper owners abandoned any responsibility to maintain the franchise. When the Internet came along, newspapers were already heading due south..."
Monday, February 01, 2010
War For Private Profit:
NY Times: U.S. Examines Whether Blackwater Tried Bribery
"The Justice Department is investigating whether officials of Blackwater Worldwide tried to bribe Iraqi government officials in hopes of retaining the firm’s security work in Iraq after a deadly shooting episode in 2007, according to current and former government officials..."
NY Times: U.S. Examines Whether Blackwater Tried Bribery
"The Justice Department is investigating whether officials of Blackwater Worldwide tried to bribe Iraqi government officials in hopes of retaining the firm’s security work in Iraq after a deadly shooting episode in 2007, according to current and former government officials..."
Flu:
Slashdot.org - WHO Handling Of Swine Flu To Be Investigated
"To say that the case for the pandemic has been over-estimated appears to be an understatement. Now, the WHO has announced that it is to investigate whether or not it bowed to pressure from drugs companies to overplay the threat. The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly has also announced an investigation into the matter after a resolution [pdf] from Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Health, was adopted. Dr. Wodarg labelled swine flu as a 'false pandemic', and claims in the resolution that ''in order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies, and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently-tested vaccines.'' By some estimates, GSK was expected to net over £1 billion from vaccine sales.'"
Slashdot.org - WHO Handling Of Swine Flu To Be Investigated
"To say that the case for the pandemic has been over-estimated appears to be an understatement. Now, the WHO has announced that it is to investigate whether or not it bowed to pressure from drugs companies to overplay the threat. The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly has also announced an investigation into the matter after a resolution [pdf] from Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Health, was adopted. Dr. Wodarg labelled swine flu as a 'false pandemic', and claims in the resolution that ''in order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies, and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently-tested vaccines.'' By some estimates, GSK was expected to net over £1 billion from vaccine sales.'"
