Tag: ek Politics

The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro

by Frederick Douglass

July 5, 1852

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable- and the difficulties to he overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence I will proceed to lay them before you.

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God speed the year of jubilee

The wide world o’er!

When from their galling chains set free,

Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,

And wear the yoke of tyranny

Like brutes no more.

That year will come, and freedom’s reign.

To man his plundered rights again

Restore.

God speed the day when human blood

Shall cease to flow!

In every clime be understood,

The claims of human brotherhood,

And each return for evil, good,

Not blow for blow;

That day will come all feuds to end,

And change into a faithful friend

Each foe.

(h/t Black Agenda Report)

Full text below.

Orwell’s Dystopian Future Is Almost Here: A Conversation With Glenn Greenwald

By Sonali Kolhatkar, TruthDig

Posted on Jul 3, 2014

In an interview on Uprising, Greenwald said that what surprised him the most about re-reading the ominous story was that “I had always remembered the ubiquity of the surveillance [in ‘1984’], which was we had a monitor in every single room of every home constantly watching every single person. So, a lot of people said, [our world is] not like ‘1984’ because not every single one of our emails is being read and or every one of our calls are being listened to because nobody could possibly be doing all that.” But, as Greenwald rightly pointed out, in Orwell’s world, “nobody actually knew whether they were being watched at all times. In fact they didn’t know if they were ever being watched.”

In essence said Greenwald, “The key to the social control was the possibility that they could be watched at any time.” Although we have no evidence that the Obama administration is engaging in any organized form of social control in our real world, the most dangerous possible outcome of the U.S. surveillance state is a dampening of dissent because of the mere possibility that the government is watching our every move.

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In Orwell’s “1984,” traitors to the regime were “thought criminals” who were disgraced by their betrayal of Big Brother. After bring singled out as such a criminal, Orwell’s protagonist, Winston, is instructed by his interrogator to believe he is “mentally deranged.” Although the novel is an extreme depiction of a fascist future, many of the tactics adopted by today’s so-called objective journalists to keep dissenters such as Greenwald and Snowden in line are consistent with Orwell’s dark fantasy. By discrediting those who speak out, it is possible to dismiss the substance of their criticisms. But, as Orwell famously wrote, “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

To be fair, what the Red Cross will tell you is that if they have excess donations for a particular crisis they feel free, morally justified even, taking those funds and re-purposing them to fill needs just as urgent but less popular.

Now you may agree or disagree with that position on it’s own merits but what those of us who have been in the charity game know is that they spend lavishly on their own pet priorities and compensation and perks for their professional staff and board memembers.

And if you don’t believe me why are they acting like scam artists?

Red Cross: How we spent Sandy money is a “trade secret”

Justin Elliott (ProPublica), Salon

Saturday, Jun 28, 2014 08:00 AM EST

Just how badly does the American Red Cross want to keep secret how it raised and spent over $300 million after Hurricane Sandy?

The charity has hired a fancy law firm to fight a public request we filed with New York state, arguing that information about its Sandy activities is a “trade secret.”

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The documents include “internal and proprietary methodology and procedures for fundraising, confidential information about its internal operations, and confidential financial information,” wrote Gabrielle Levin of Gibson Dunn in a letter to the attorney general’s office.

If those details were disclosed, “the American Red Cross would suffer competitive harm because its competitors would be able to mimic the American Red Cross’s business model for an increased competitive advantage,”  Levin wrote.

The letter doesn’t specify who the Red Cross’ “competitors” are.

Why Is the American Red Cross Acting Like Big Business and Not a Charity?

By: BrandonJ, Firedog Lake

Friday June 27, 2014 10:41 pm

The Red Cross is also under investigation by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who said last year 42 percent of donations, at the time, raised by 89 different charities-the Red Cross among them-did not go victims of Hurricane Sandy. Schneiderman, along with others, was able to apply pressure to the Red Cross to donate an additional $6 million to the victims.

As mentioned in the article by Elliot, the use of “trade secrets” by the Red Cross is a peculiar argument by the foundation since charities ordinarily would not be expected to use the exemption. Indeed, the Red Cross is so protective of its structure that it hired Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the law firm New Jersey Governor Chris Christie hired to investigate the”Bridgegate” scandal, ultimately exonerating most of Christie’s staff after the questionable investigation.

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The use of their “business model” is alarming considering this model failed after Hurricane Sandy hit the Mid-Atlantic region. Journalist Sam Knight covered its failures during Hurricane Sandy relief in a recent article highlighting the power Occupy Sandy held during the crisis. In one example, Knight revealed how the Red Cross failed to help move a 90-year-old woman to a warm place, yet it provided a hotel in Manhattan for its volunteers, costing $181,000.

Knight continued on the problems the Red Cross had when distributing aid to the residents affected by the hurricane.

“Just outside the church, another scene of clumsily administered relief was on display. At the nearest intersection, a Red Cross van announced, via megaphone, ‘hot soup!’ to no one in particular. Two blocks in either direction, locals were ladling warm meals to anyone seeking a hearty eat. The truck left not long after arriving. It fed no one,” Knight wrote.

It is difficult to believe any other charity would emulate the “business model” of the American Red Cross in future disasters considering its most recent failure. In fact, they would follow what Occupy Sandy did, as journalist Allison Kilkenny mentioned when reporting on their efforts.

What about Schneiderman’s investigation?

Well, what about it?

New York’s Schneiderman Accepts Red Cross’ “Trade Secrets” Excuse to Hide Sandy Spending

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Posted on July 1, 2014

It’s not clear what to make of an attorney general who opens an investigation and then accepts lame excuses for maintaining secrecy from its target, in this case, the American Red Cross. We’re flagging this example because it exemplifies an effort by organizations to use “trade secrets” as a pretext for hiding more and more of their dealings with governments. This is absurd, since the premise of Federal and state Freedom of Information Act laws is that government records should be open to the public, and that includes records of entities doing business with government agencies. In other words, if you want to have government bodies as your customers, one of the costs of doing business is having your formal interactions with them subject to public review.

The Red Cross has come under repeated criticism for poor performance at its core mission, disaster relief. The charity has an unusual quasi-public role by virtue of obtaining a Congressional charter in 1905 develop a system of emergency relief and disaster prevention. Thus, the Red Cross, as a charity, has long been a monopoly provider of national first/early responder services. No other charity has a similar stature or scope. While the Red Cross also receives a limited amount of funding from FEMA, the far more important aspect of its relationship with government is the considerable prestige and competitive advantage it has gained through its charter, which it had obtained through able performance under its founder Clara Barton in providing assistance in major calamities in the 19th century, such as the Great Fire of 1881 and the Jonestown Flood of 1889. The Red Cross also has a formal role in conjunction with FEMA in providing “mass care, emergency assistance, temporary housing” and other services.

Proof of the Red Cross’ de facto monopoly position comes through the fact that there is no organization to take over its role as its performance has faltered. The Red Cross was criticized for slow responses and waste of funds in 9/11 and Katrina. Congress forced governance changes on the Red Cross in 2007, but that was insufficient to lead to better results in Hurricane Sandy. As New York City readers may know, Occupy Sandy ran rings around the Red Cross in the hardest-hit areas here, particularly Staten Island.

That of course raised the obvious question: the Red Cross had solicited aggressively for funds during and shortly after the hurricane. Where did the $300+ million go? Why weren’t the relief services delivered well?

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But the troubling part is that Schneiderman, who has proven repeatedly to be an overly cautious prosecutor, took any of the Red Cross’ claims seriously. “Trade secret” status is based on the ability for competitor to do economic damage with the information. The only information in general that a charity possesses of this nature is related to donor giving: who the big donors are, what their giving patterns have been, and what sort of success they’ve had with various types of fundraising campaigns. Particularly for an organization as large and presumably as sophisticated as the Red Cross, that sort of know-how might be valuable, if it really were unique, as opposed to well-known and widely used solicitation and donor-grooming methods.

But with the Red Cross, you have to look at its monopoly provider status. Who can compete with them? The idea that some other organization is hot on its heels and eager to copy its methods is barmy. The closest direct competitor is Médecins Sans Frontières, which is not a player in US disasters, and local charities, which lack the clout and reach. So any claims regarding possible competitive harm should be regarded with extreme skepticism.

Yet Schneiderman took way too much of the Red Cross’ demand for special treatment at face value, and agreed to shield material related to “business strategies, internal operational procedures and decisions, and the internal deliberations and decision-making processes that affect fundraising and the allocation of donations.” I guarantee that like the private equity descriptions of their business strategies in limited partnership agreements that were released to the public, that there’s no special sauce in that, nor in anything else save possibly fundraising. The experts ProPublica quoted in its article also though the Red Cross claims were indefensible.

The good news is that fighting disclosure seems to have backfired on the Red Cross. As Barry Ritholtz at Bloomberg wrote.

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As poor as the Red Cross’ conduct is, it should also be shame on Schneiderman for enabling this unjustifiable position. His knuckling under to the Red Cross extends the bad precedent of having private equity contracts with government investors exempted from public scrutiny. Contract bids and terms are also competitively valuable, yet heretofore, no one would have thought it acceptable to keep them from the media and interested citizens. But public officials like Schneiderman are all too willing to accede to private sector secrecy demands, no matter how ludicrous, which will make it easier for these organizations to hide incompetence and looting.

Now don’t get me wrong.  They do a great job at collecting blood and Water Safety instruction, but looting is not too strong a word.

A documentary about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the slide to the Great War.

Now personally I think the roots of the Great War go much deeper than presented here, at least to the Franco-Prussian War, but it will take longer than I have today to develop them so you’ll just have to wait.

Is this the beginning of the end of the age of legal government spying?

Trevor Timm, The Guardian

Saturday 28 June 2014 07.45 EDT

The US supreme court’s unanimous 9-0 opinion this week requiring police to get a warrant before searching your cellphone is arguably the most important legal privacy decision of the digital age.

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One of the most contentious issues in courts high and low right now is the extent to which your cellphone location information should fall under the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Whether you’re on a call or not, your phone emits a signal to cell towers that pinpoints your exact whereabouts, 24/7. And the cops believe – as they do for most things digital – that they can get that information without a warrant. Two appeals courts have, sadly, agreed with them, but two weeks ago, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an important decision: yes, your location information should be protected.

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Roberts did throw a wrench into the NSA’s main defense for what it does: self-policing. The NSA’s argument has always been essentially this: we don’t need court oversight over our massive surveillance machine because our internal privacy controls are so good.

Roberts, however, ridicules this theory in his Riley opinion: the government promised the court it would create “government agency protocols” and make sure not to abuse its power if allowed to continue searching cellphones without a warrant. “Probably a good idea,” Roberts wrote after going into detail about the historical origins of the Constitutional right to privacy, “but the Founders did not fight a revolution to gain the right to government agency protocols.”

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(T)he cloud has always terrified privacy advocates because of what’s known as the “third party doctrine”, devised by the supreme court in the pre-digital era. The theory, as law professor Daniel Solove explained this week, “holds that if data is known to a third party, then there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in that data (and, as a result, no Fourth Amendment protection at all).”

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But Roberts called into question this distinction when he wrote that it “generally makes little difference” whether data in your cellphone is stored locally or in the cloud. This may seem like a throwaway line, but it could hold significant sway down the road.

…but it would be nice if so.

Increased US drone use ‘may create slippery slope to wider war’, report says

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Thursday 26 June 2014 14.15 EDT

Rather than the typical drone critics, the skepticism over what the Obama administration calls “targeted killing” – usually accomplished through drone strikes – comes from, among others, a former US military commander for the Middle East; a former commander of the Afghanistan war; a former FBI and CIA senior officer; and two senior Pentagon policy officials from Obama’s first term, when drone strikes became the signature US counterterrorism weapon.

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“The increasing use of lethal UAVs may create a slippery slope leading to continual or wider war,” the report warns, lending official recognition to a point made for years by leftwing critics of Obama’s drone attacks.

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Echoing a criticism from United Nations drone investigator Ben Emmerson, the report finds that “despite the undoubted good faith of US decision-makers, it would be difficult to conclude that US targeted strikes are consistent with core rule of law norms.”

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(T)he Stimson report acknowledges that even in cases where only “terrorists” are killed, the strikes “can cause great resentment, particularly in contexts in which terrorist recruiting efforts rely on tribal loyalties or on an economically desperate population.”

US cited controversial law in decision to kill American citizen by drone

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Monday 23 June 2014 13.48 EDT

“We believe that the AUMF’s authority to use lethal force abroad also may apply in appropriate circumstances to a United States citizen who is part of the forces of an enemy authorization within the scope of the force authorization,” reads the Justice Department memorandum, written for attorney general Eric Holder on 16 July 2010 and ostensibly intended strictly for Awlaki’s case.

Among those circumstances: “Where high-level government officials have determined that a capture operation is infeasible and that the targeted person is part of a dangerous enemy force and is engaged in activities that pose a continued and imminent threat to US persons or interests.”

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While Obama administration officials have for years insisted that Awlaki was an operational leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which in 2009 and 2010 attempted unsuccessfully to detonate bombs inside the US, they have also fought lawsuits seeking to reveal their case against Awlaki.

But for the case against Awlaki, hinted at in a Justice Department “white paper” summarizing it that leaked last year, the administration leaned significantly on the broad leeway for counter-terrorism the AUMF established.

“Just as the AUMF authorizes the military detention of a US citizen captured abroad who is part of an armed force within the scope of the AUMF, it also authorizes the use of ‘necessary and appropriate’ lethal force against a US citizen who has joined such an armed force,” reads the memo, written by former Justice Department lawyer David Barron, who also analyzed and rejected arguments that killing Awlaki would be tantamount to murder.

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The release of the memo, as ordered Monday by a federal appeals court, ended a legal battle that has stretched for years, intended to prevent the administration from killing Awlaki or any other US citizen without trial. After losing an April appeal and confronting a challenge by Republican senator Rand Paul to deny Barron a federal judgeship, the Obama administration agreed not to fight the document’s disclosure.

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In the disclosed portions, Barron’s memo does not explicitly vouch for the government’s case against Awlaki, referring instead to “the facts represented to us”. It refers instead to Awlaki as a “leader” who was “continuously planning attacks” against the US, without providing an evidentiary basis for claims central to the extraordinary circumvention of normal due process procedures. Nor do the public sections explain why capturing Awlaki was not feasible, nor why the Justice Department believes it need not have provided Awlaki with judicial process.

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Rejecting a government argument that the release of the memorandum would chill attorney-client communications, the court wrote on Monday: “If this contention were upheld, waiver of privileges protecting legal advice would never occur. … We need not fear that OLC will lack for clients.”

Several of the government’s appeals for secrecy have been overtaken by the public record, the court found. Among them: the “identity of the country in which al-Awlaki was killed”, which was reported as being Yemen on the day of the lethal strike; and the involvement of the CIA, which in addition to being an open secret for years was confirmed by former director Leon Panetta.

“We recognize that in some circumstances the very fact that legal analysis was given concerning a planned operation would risk disclosure of the likelihood of that operation, but that is not the situation here where drone strikes and targeted killings have been publicly acknowledged at the highest levels of the Government,” the court explained.

The ACLU, which sought along with the New York Times to compel the release of the memo, vowed to fight the government’s additional arguments for secrecy around other legal foundations of what it calls its “targeted killing” program.

April 17, 2007

Fixed Soccer Matches Cast Shadow Over World Cup

By DECLAN HILL and JERÉ LONGMAN, The New York Times

MAY 31, 2014

A soccer referee named Ibrahim Chaibou walked into a bank in a small South African city carrying a bag filled with as much as $100,000 in $100 bills, according to another referee traveling with him. The deposit was so large that a bank employee gave Mr. Chaibou a gift of commemorative coins bearing the likeness of Nelson Mandela

…

The report found that the match-rigging syndicate and its referees infiltrated the upper reaches of global soccer in order to fix exhibition matches and exploit them for betting purposes. It provides extensive details of the clever and brazen ways that fixers apparently manipulated “at least five matches and possibly more” in South Africa ahead of the last World Cup. As many as 15 matches were targets, including a game between the United States and Australia, according to interviews and emails printed in the FIFA report.

Although corruption has vexed soccer for years, the South Africa case gives an unusually detailed look at the ease with which professional gamblers can fix matches, as well as the governing body’s severe problems in policing itself and its member federations. The report, at 44 pages, includes an account of Mr. Chaibou’s trip to the bank, as well as many other scenes describing how matches were apparently rigged.

After one match, the syndicate even made a death threat against the official who tried to stop the fix, investigators found.

“Were the listed matches fixed?” the report said. “On the balance of probabilities, yes!”

Inside the Fixing: How a Gang Battered Soccer’s Frail Integrity

By DECLAN HILL, The New York Times

JUNE 1, 2014

The detectives soon discovered that Wilson Raj Perumal, a match fixer from Singapore, was toiling away in Rovaniemi, working with several players, unbeknown to the coach. Mr. Perumal was considered a risk by his associates in a Singaporean match-rigging syndicate, so the group had sent a representative to Finland to tip off the police, Mr. Granat said.

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The match-fixing syndicate Mr. Perumal worked for very effectively exploited soccer’s vulnerabilities. According to European police investigators, the syndicate has manipulated hundreds of professional soccer matches around the world by identifying players and referees ripe for bribery – particularly in countries that pay low wages.

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Mr. Perumal learned his trade in an informal school for match fixers in Singapore, along with Tan Seet Eng, a Singaporean man known widely as Dan Tan. In the early 1990s, they would gather in the stadiums where illegal bookmakers would take bets on the Malaysian-Singaporean soccer league.

The fixers were so successful that a Malaysian Cabinet minister estimated that they succeeded in fixing more than 70 percent of the league’s matches. The corruption was so bad that the Malaysian-Singaporean league collapsed.

…

Uncle Frankie taught Mr. Tan and Mr. Perumal the dirty secret of international soccer: Many teams and their personnel are poor, so they often have players, coaches and referees open to bribes.

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With its talented players with little money, Ghana is one of the countries that fixers frequently target at international tournaments, Mr. Nyantakyi said. So he was not surprised when, in 2007, it was discovered that there had been an attempt to fix an international match involving Ghana’s celebrated goalkeeping coach, Abukari Damba, who was working with the Singaporean fixers.

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In February 2013, Europol, the European Union’s police intelligence agency, said the results of 680 matches worldwide from 2008 to 2011, including World Cup qualifying matches and European Champions League matches, were considered suspicious. Mr. Tan’s group did most of this work, investigators said.

…

The European investigators determined that Mr. Tan’s syndicate also managed to fix matches played in the United States. In 2010, it persuaded a majority of El Salvador’s national team to throw a game against D.C. United of Major League Soccer as well as an international match against the United States in Miami. Many of the Salvadoran players were subsequently barred for life.

Obama’s Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big Banks: TISA

By William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives

Posted on June 24, 2014

The three “de’s” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization – has been critical to the three modern U.S. financial crises. The combination is intensely criminogenic and produces the fraud epidemics that drive our crises. The second, and vastly more destructive, phase of the Savings and Loan (S&L) debacle is a classic example. The criminogenic environment was the product of each of the three “de’s” and modern executive and professional compensation.

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TISA is designed to replicate, indeed, optimize the criminogenic environment that made fraudulent financial CEOs wealthy by “looting” “their” banks. The (effective) “regulators in the field” figured this out by 1983 – over 30 years ago. We wrote up our findings in great detail. Top economists and top white-collar criminologists studying those findings a decade later (1993) agreed with the findings. Since the original findings in 1983, we have the (prevented) “liar’s” loans crisis of 1991 when federal S&L regulators based in California drove what were then a brand new product called “low doc” loans out of the regulated industry. That “second front” – while the S&L regulators were containing the S&L debacle – was dealt with so effectively that there was no resultant financial crisis. Indeed, it is only with the benefit of the current crisis that we can understand that the containment of the overall S&L debacle (driven primarily by fraudulent commercial real estate loans and investments) and the incipient crisis is liar’s loans prevented a crisis that would have become similar in scope to the current crisis. The S&L debacle was contained before it caused even a minor national recession.

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The TISA draft (Article X.16) is very clear about the second great paradox: bankers must be told everything that regulators are thinking about adopting and have ample opportunity to influence the regulators’ drafting of the rule. But TISA is an international secret that will remain an international secret for five years after it is adopted. Like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the drafts are kept secret even from Congress. Indeed, TISA is “classified” so that those who might blow the whistle on the travesty may be prosecuted.

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TISA’s drafting consists of a meeting of banking thieves who are successfully demanding a return to what Gramlich correctly described as “no cops on the beat.” If the street robbers of the world demanded that we remove the cops on the beat we would be enraged. Bankers and their neoclassical economist allies, however, regularly lobby for just such a boon to elite white-collar criminals. We have millennia of experience with what happens when we give the elites the power to loot with impunity.

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TISA is awful for honest bankers. Effective financial regulators are the essential “cops on the beat.” Only we have shown the ability to break the “Gresham’s” dynamic (bad ethics drives good ethics out of the markets and professions) that fraudulent CEOs create. When we break that dynamic we make it possible for honest bankers to prevail. TISA is good for only one group – dishonest bank executives.

That brings us back to the reason the bank CEOs have demanded that TISA be “classified” and kept from the public and even Congress. Indeed, the plan is to classify its provisions for five years after TISA is adopted. That delay is meant to make it politically possible for TISA to be adopted and then continue to protect heads of state from being thrown out of office by their enraged constituents.

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Ask yourself this question: why would the bankers and heads of state have demanded, and received, “classified” treatment of a document that did not have any confidential information (there are no state secrets, no privacy issues, and nothing of proprietary value in the leaked TISA draft) and made no meaningful restriction on regulation and supervision due to the “nowithstanding” clause of Article 17? The demand for classified treatment makes it inescapable that the bankers and government officials involved in drafting TISA are trying to hide something they believe would outrage the public. The paradox is that the bankers’ and politicians’ rabid fear of disclosure to the public and Congress of TISA’s assault on regulation confirms beyond any reasonable doubt that subparagraph 2 of Article 17 and Article 20 combine to make TISA a grave threat to the global economy, workers, and honest bankers by making the financial world even more criminogenic.

Andrew Bacevich

Extended

Transcript

Chaos in Iraq

“We have been engaged in the Islamic world at least since 1980, in a military project based on the assumption that the adroit use of American hard power can somehow pacify or fix this part of the world. We can now examine more than three decades of this effort.

Let’s look at what U.S. military intervention in Iraq has achieved, in Afghanistan has achieved, in Somalia has achieved, in Lebanon has achieved, in Libya has achieved. I mean, ask ourselves the very simple question. Is the region becoming more stable? Is it becoming more democratic? Are we alleviating, reducing the prevalence of anti-Americanism?”

Fair Taxes for All

How Tax Reform Can Save the Middle Class

It’s just a Nobel Prize.  What does he know about Economics?