Labels: bigotry, free speech, Glenn Greenwald, Juan Williams. NPR, Muslims, Salon
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posted by profmarcus at
10/22/2010
The War Logs
A huge trove of secret field reports from the battlegrounds
of Iraq sheds new light on the war, including such fraught
subjects as civilian deaths, detainee abuse and the
involvement of Iran.
The secret archive is the second such cache obtained by the
independent organization WikiLeaks and made available to
several news organizations. A close analysis of the documents
helps illuminate several important aspects of the war:
-- The deaths of Iraqi civilians -- at the hands mainly of
other Iraqis, but also of the American military -- appear to
be greater than the numbers made public by the United States
during the Bush administration.
-- While the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans,
particularly at the Abu Ghraib prison, shocked the American
public and much of the world, the documents paint an even
more lurid picture of abuse by America's Iraqi allies -- a
brutality from which the Americans at times averted their
eyes.
Labels: accountability, civilian casualties, document dump, Iraq, whistleblowers, Wikileaks
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/22/2010
Top Companies Aid Chamber of Commerce in Policy Fights
Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations.
Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed new rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities.
And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation that has helped wage a national campaign to limit the ability of trial lawyers to sue businesses.
These large donations — none of which were publicly disclosed by the chamber, a tax-exempt group which keeps its donors secret — offer a glimpse of the chamber’s money-raising efforts, which it has ramped up recently in an orchestrated campaign to become one of the most well-financed critics of the Obama administration and an influential player in this fall’s Congressional elections.
Labels: campaign fund-raising, corporate military industrial government complex, corporatocarcy, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/21/2010
The Obama administration has adopted new procedures for using the Defense Department’s vast array of cyberwarfare capabilities in case of an attack on vital computer networks inside the United States, delicately navigating historic rules that restrict military action on American soil.
A "Memorandum of Agreement" struck last week between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Security Agency (NSA) promises to increase Pentagon control over America's telecommunications and electronic infrastructure.
It's all in the interest of "cybersecurity" of course, or so we've been told, since much of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) driving administration policy is a closely-held state secret.
Authority granted the über spy shop by the Bush and Obama administrations was handed to NSA by the still-classified National Security Presidential Directive 54, Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54/HSPD 23) in 2008 by then-President Bush.
The Agreement follows closely on the heels of reports last week by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that DHS has been tracking people online and that the agency even established a "Social Networking Monitoring Center" to do so.
Documents obtained by EFF through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, revealed that the agency has been vacuuming-up "items of interest," systematically monitoring "citizenship petitioners" and analyzing "online public communication."
The documents suggest that "DHS collected a massive amount of data on individuals and organizations explicitly tied to a political event," the Obama inauguration.
This inevitably raises a troubling question: what other "political events" are being monitored by government snoops? Following last month's raids on antiwar activists by heavily-armed FBI SWAT teams, the answer is painfully obvious.
And with new reports, such as Monday's revelations by The Wall Street Journal that Facebook "apps" have been "transmitting identifying information--in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names--to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies," online privacy, if such a beast ever existed, is certainly now a thing of the past.
[...]
"In early 2008," a PI analyst writes, "President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD-54/HSPD-23) formalizing the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI). This initiative created a series of classified programs with a total budget of approximately $30 billion. Many of these programs remain secret and their activities are largely unknown to the public."
Amongst the programs stood up by CNCI "is an effort to encourage information sharing between the public and private sector called 'Project 12'."
The whistleblowing web site "recently acquired the key report from the Project 12 meetings: Improving Protection of Privately Owned Critical Network Infrastructure Through Public-Private Partnerships. This 35-page, For Official Use Only report is a guide to creating public-private partnerships that facilitate the implementation of 'actionable recommendations that [reflect] the reality of shared responsibility between the public and private sectors with respect to securing the nation's cyber assets, networks, systems, and functions'."
Labels: cyberwar, domestic military deployment, patético, Posse Comitatus
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/21/2010
Israeli settlers building 544 new homes
Israeli settlers have begun building new homes at an extraordinary pace since the government lifted its moratorium on West Bank housing starts — almost 550 in three weeks, more than four times faster than the last two years.
And many homes are going up in areas that under practically any peace scenario would become part of a Palestinian state, a trend that could doom U.S.-brokered peace talks.
Labels: Israel, Israeli settlements, Middle East, Palestine, peace, West Bank
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/20/2010
Behind the wonderfully engaging smile of this president there is the increasingly disturbing suggestion of a cynical power-grabbing politician whose swift rise in power reflects less the earnestness of his message and far more the skills of a traditional political hack.
[...]
The more one learns about the political roots of our economic meltdown, the more the Democratic Party stands revealed as an equal partner with the Republicans at the center of corruption. ... We are drowning in a bipartisan cesspool of corruption, and the sooner we grasp that fact the better.
Labels: Barack Obama, bipartisanship, corruption, Democrats, economic collapse, financial meltdown, Republicans, Robert Scheer
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/20/2010
Labels: domestic surveillance, internet surveillance, Mark Fiore, National Security State, warrantless domestic wiretapping
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/19/2010
Labels: democracy, elites, plutocracy, Robert Reich, super-rich
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/19/2010
U.S. Pushes to Ease Technical Obstacles to Wiretapping
Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in compliance with surveillance orders, are pushing to overhaul a federal law that requires phone and broadband carriers to ensure that their networks can be wiretapped, federal officials say.
The officials say tougher legislation is needed because some telecommunications companies in recent years have begun new services and made system upgrades that create technical obstacles to surveillance. They want to increase legal incentives and penalties aimed at pushing carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast to ensure that any network changes will not disrupt their ability to conduct wiretaps.
Labels: domestic spying, domestic surveillance, National Security State, privacy, warrantless domestic wiretapping
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/19/2010
The world’s 4.4 billion adults, notes the new Credit Suisse research, now hold $194.5 trillion in wealth. That’s enough, if shared evenly across the globe, to guarantee every adult in the world a $43,800 net worth.
But the world’s wealth, of course, does not stand evenly divided, and the new Credit Suisse study, to its credit, neatly breaks down the arithmetic of our staggering global unevenness.
We now have, at the wealth spectrum’s uppermost reaches, just over 1,000 billionaires and another 80,000 “ultra high net worth individuals” worth over $50 million each. We can add into this wealthy summit still another 24 million adults worth between $1 million and $50 million.
At other end of the global spectrum sit three billion people — “more than two thirds of the global adult population” – with an average wealth per adult less than $10,000. About 1.1 billion of these adults hold net worths less than $1,000.
“Our analysis,” the Credit Suisse study says plainly, “finds some stark differences in the distribution of wealth.”
The study’s starkest data snapshot? Maybe this: Half the people aged 20 and over in the world today hold under $4,000 in net worth, after subtracting debts from assets. This half the world’s population holds under 2 percent of world wealth.
The world’s richest 1 percent, adults with at least $588,000 to call their own, hold 43 percent of the world’s wealth, all by themselves.
Labels: elites, income gap, poverty, super-rich, working poor
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/18/2010
Labels: Defense Department, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, propaganda, Robert Gates, Salon, whistleblowers, Wikileaks
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/17/2010
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