Tag: ek Politics

So not the droids you’re looking for.

N.S.A. Report Outlined Goals for More Power

By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS, The New York Times

Published: November 22, 2013

In a February 2012 paper laying out the four-year strategy for the N.S.A.’s signals intelligence operations, which include the agency’s eavesdropping and communications data collection around the world, agency officials set an objective to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.”

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Using sweeping language, the paper also outlined some of the agency’s other ambitions. They included defeating the cybersecurity practices of adversaries in order to acquire the data the agency needs from “anyone, anytime, anywhere.” The agency also said it would try to decrypt or bypass codes that keep communications secret by influencing “the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships,” human spies and intelligence partners in other countries. It also talked of the need to “revolutionize” analysis of its vast collections of data to “radically increase operational impact.”

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Intent on unlocking the secrets of adversaries, the paper underscores the agency’s long-term goal of being able to collect virtually everything available in the digital world. To achieve that objective, the paper suggests that the N.S.A. plans to gain greater access, in a variety of ways, to the infrastructure of the world’s telecommunications networks.

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Yet the paper also shows how the agency believes it can influence and shape trends in high-tech industries in other ways to suit its needs. One of the agency’s goals is to “continue to invest in the industrial base and drive the state of the art for high performance computing to maintain pre-eminent cryptanalytic capability for the nation.” The paper added that the N.S.A. must seek to “identify new access, collection and exploitation methods by leveraging global business trends in data and communications services.”

And it wants to find ways to combine all of its technical tools to enhance its surveillance powers. The N.S.A. will seek to integrate its “capabilities to reach previously inaccessible targets in support of exploitation, cyberdefense and cyberoperations,” the paper stated.

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The agency also intends to improve its access to encrypted communications used by individuals, businesses and foreign governments, the strategy document said. The N.S.A. has already had some success in defeating encryption, The New York Times has reported, but the document makes it clear that countering “ubiquitous, strong, commercial network encryption” is a top priority. The agency plans to fight back against the rise of encryption through relationships with companies that develop encryption tools and through espionage operations. In other countries, the document said, the N.S.A. must also “counter indigenous cryptographic programs by targeting their industrial bases with all available Sigint and Humint” – human intelligence, meaning spies.

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One of the agency’s other four-year goals was to “share bulk data” more broadly to allow for better analysis. While the paper does not explain in detail how widely it would disseminate bulk data within the intelligence community, the proposal raises questions about what safeguards the N.S.A. plans to place on its domestic phone and email data collection programs to protect Americans’ privacy.

N.S.A. officials have insisted that they have placed tight controls on those programs. In an interview, the senior intelligence officials said that the strategy paper was referring to the agency’s desire to share foreign data more broadly, not phone logs of Americans collected under the Patriot Act.

Above all, the strategy paper suggests the N.S.A.’s vast view of its mission: nothing less than to “dramatically increase mastery of the global network.”

Reich: How Unequal Can America Get?

Inequality for All

Reid, Democrats trigger ‘nuclear’ option; eliminate most filibusters on nominees

By Paul Kane, Washington Post

Updated: Thursday, November 21, 1:11 PM

The partisan battles that have paralyzed Washington in recent years took a historic turn on Thursday, when Senate Democrats eliminated filibusters for most presidential nominations, severely curtailing the political leverage of the Republican minority in the Senate and assuring an escalation of partisan warfare.

The rule change means federal judge nominees and executive-office appointments can be confirmed by a simple majority of senators, rather than the 60-vote super majority that has been required for more than two centuries.

The change does not apply to Supreme Court nominations. But the vote, mostly along party lines, reverses nearly 225 years of precedent and dramatically alters the landscape for both Democratic and Republican presidents, especially if their own political party holds a majority of, but fewer than 60, Senate seats.

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The vote to change the rule passed 52-48. Three Democrats – Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) – joined with 45 Republicans in opposing the measure. Levin is a longtime senator who remembers well the years when Democratic filibusters blocked nominees of Republican presidents; Manchin and Pryor come from Republican-leaning states.

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(T)he impact of the move is be more far-reaching. The means for executing this rules change – a simple-majority vote, rather than the long-standing two-thirds majority required to change the chamber’s standing rules – is more controversial than the actual move itself.

Many Senate majorities have thought about using this technical maneuver to get around centuries of parliamentary precedent, but none has done so in a unilateral move on a major change of rules or precedents. This simple-majority vote has been executed in the past to change relatively minor precedents involving how to handle amendments; for example, one such change short-circuited the number of filibusters that the minority party could deploy on nominations.

In March 2004, the Justice Department under Ashcroft ruled that the Stellar Wind domestic intelligence program was illegal. The day after the ruling, Ashcroft became critically ill with acute pancreatitis. President Bush sent his White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card Jr. to Ashcroft’s hospital bed. They wanted him to sign a document reversing the Justice Department’s ruling. But the semi-conscious Ashcroft refused to sign; Acting Attorney General James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, head of the Office of Legal Counsel for DOJ, were there to back him up. Bush reauthorized the operation by executive decision, over formal Justice Department objections.

Also there was FBI Director Robert Mueller.  None of them, neither Ashcroft nor Comey nor Goldsmith nor Mueller was any sort of hero.  The program continues to this day, it’s merely been renamed.

8 Years Later, NSA Still Using Same PR Strategy to Hide Illegal Wiretap Program

by emptywheel

Posted on November 21, 2013

Between these two posts (one, two), I’ve shown that the Executive Branch never stopped illegally wiretapping Americans, even after the worst part of it got “shut down” after the March 2004 hospital confrontation. Instead, they got FISC to approve collection with certain rules, then violated the rules consistently. When that scheme was exposed with the transition between the Bush and Obama Administrations, the Executive adopted two new strategies to hide the illegal wiretapping. First, simply not counting how many Americans they were illegally wiretapping, thus avoiding explicit violation of 50 USC 1809(a)(2). And, starting just as the Executive was confessing to its illegal wiretapping, moving – and expanding it – overseas. Given that they’re collecting content, that is a violation in spirit, at least, of Section 704 of FISA Amendments Act, which requires a warrant for wiretapping an American overseas (the government probably says this doesn’t apply because GCHQ does much of the wiretapping).

One big discovery the Snowden leaks have shown us, then, is that the government has never really stopped Bush’s illegal wiretapping program.

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When WSJ reported that the NSA has access to 75% of the Internet traffic in the US, I Con released a misleading rebuttal. When, in the wake of a NYT report that NSA and GCHQ were using vastly expanded contact chaining (which we now know was initiated just as the illegal domestic program was being revealed) to produce dossiers on people, even inattentive members of Congress started asking about upstream collection and EO 12333 violations, top officials first distorted the questions then refused to answer them. When various outlets in Europe revealed how much spying NSA and GCHQ were doing on Europeans, the I Con unleashed their secret weapon, the “conjunction,” which succeeded in getting most National Security journalists to forget about GCHQ’s known, voracious collection.

Then there’s the response to WaPo’s report that NSA had returned to its old ways of stealing data from Google and Yahoo. At first, I thought they were just engaging in their typical old non-denial denials. They were doing that, sure, but as Bart Gellman revealed during his debate with Michael Hayden (just after 44:00), they also tried to undermine WaPo’s report by refusing to engage at all.

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In response to this treatment, the WaPo did a remarkable fisking of Administration pushback claims and – in the process – released more sensitive documents to prove they were right. Ha!

Almost 8 years ago, when NYT revealed the illegal wiretap program, the Bush Administration largely succeeded in hiding the biggest legal problems with the program by focusing attention on just a small fraction of the program, which they dubbed the “TSP,” while hiding the rest. Remarkably, the I Con is still using precisely the same strategy to hide what remains structurally the same illegal wiretap program that has, however, ballooned in size.

In Afghanistan: ‘Security Deal’ Means US Occupation Forever

Sarah Lazare, staff writer Common Dreams

Published on Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Days before the so-called bi-lateral security agreement heads to an Afghan council of elders and political leaders for a final decision, the U.S. is attempting to force through a stipulation that would allow U.S. troops to continue raiding Afghan homes, in addition to measures giving U.S. troops and contractors immunity from Afghan law and extending U.S. military presence far beyond Obama’s 2014 pullout date.

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The U.S. is pushing for the right to enter Afghan homes over the apparent objection of Afghan negotiators. “We believe it is not only the violation of the Afghan sovereignty, but also of the basic rights of the Afghan people,” said President Hamid Karzai’s spokesperson Aimal Faizi on Monday, referencing the U.S. demand to be allowed to enter Afghan homes.

This latest sticking point comes after attempts on the part of U.S. negotiators to ram through immunity for U.S. troops and independent contractors from Afghan law. According to (t)he Washington Post, the U.S. appears to have succeeded in including this immunity in an accord reached Saturday.

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The Washington Post reports that a draft text of the agreement does not specify how many U.S. troops will be allowed to remain in Afghanistan, giving the U.S. unilateral power to determine this number. Furthermore, the document does not prohibit the U.S. from using Afghan territory to launch drone strikes against nearby Pakistan.

Leaked Draft Points To Endless War In Afghanistan

By: DSWright, Firedog Lake

Tuesday November 19, 2013 10:42 am

Despite constant public promises by President Obama and his administration that US forces were leaving Afghanistan in 2014 a draft of a US-Afghan security deal details plans for endless war in Afghanistan. Support for the war in Afghanistan is non-existent among the American public which rightly sees it as a waste of blood and treasure. The only ones benefiting at this point are opium dealers in Kabul and war profiteers in Washington.

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This draft stands in stark contrast to public commitments Obama made to the American people wherein he declared “as our coalition agreed, by the end of 2014 the Afghans will be fully responsible for the security of their country.”

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15,000 American troops indefinitely? That is the Afghans taking “full responsibility?” And how much will that cost since President Obama keeps searching for a Grand Bargain to cut even more spending on the backs of seniors and the poor. Currently the Afghanistan War is costing $1.7 billion a week – it’s the age of austerity for everything but pointless wars.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Obama Administration’s lack of imagination is only surpassed by its dishonesty. A war that is pointless even by American imperial standards will seemingly go on forever until strong enough opposition can be mustered here at home to stop this senseless killing and profligate spending.

The loya jirga which must ratify this agreement starts meeting on Thursday.  Hamid Karzai has indicated he will lobby in favor of immunity for US Troops and CIA and DOD Mercenaries but is unalterably opposed to allowing random home invasions.

The piece speaks for itself, as what I choose to highlight so often does.  That is my style, to draw your attention to articles of significance and interest and construct from them a narrative, a story that encapsulates a truth about our current situation.  After all, who are you going to believe?  Me, or your own lying eyes?

I expect that some that read this will be as outraged as I am, others (equally outraged) will spring forth in defense of a President and his intimate staff who choose to immerse themselves in a West Wing bubble no less insular and irrelevant than the Imperial Court of the Forbidden City.

I have rightly called Politico Tiger Beat on the Potomac after the fashion of  Charles Pierce because of its attention to process and personality instead of politics or policy and there is no denying their conservative point of view in a Village that is essentially composed of aristocrats and courtiers, but unlike the stridently partisan depictions of this President and his Administration as do nothing layabouts who lounge all day in their sweats watching Hoopies this one has the air of authenticity even though composed by the same Rolodex stenography I frequently decry.

Maybe better than I can distill it to a few paragraphs, but the rot is so pervasive I can’t easily summarize it.  It is a tale of corruption and greed and disorganization and indifference that touches so many policies and actions that it is hard to condense.

I’ll introduce it as the author does with the tale of Steven Chu, but you should read the whole thing.  This is not an isolated incident.

Locked in the Cabinet

By GLENN THRUSH, Politico Magazine

November 2013

Steven Chu is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a brilliant innovator whose research fills several all-but-incomprehensible paragraphs of a Wikipedia entry that spans his achievements in single-molecule physics, the slowing of atoms through the use of lasers and the invention of something called an “optical tweezer.” President Barack Obama even credits Chu with solving the 2010 Gulf oil spill, claiming that Chu strolled into BP’s office and “essentially designed the cap that ultimately worked.” With rare exception, Chu is the smartest guy in the room, and that includes the Cabinet Room, which he occupied uneasily as secretary of energy from 2009 to the spring of 2013.

But the president’s aides didn’t quite see Chu that way. He might have been the only Obama administration official with a Nobel other than the president himself, but inside the West Wing of the White House Chu was considered a smart guy who said lots of stupid things, a genius with an appallingly low political IQ-“clueless,” as deputy chief of staff Jim Messina would tell colleagues at the time.

In April 2009, Chu joined Obama’s entourage for one of the administration’s first overseas trips, to Trinidad and Tobago for a Summit of the Americas focused on economic development. Chu was not scheduled to address the media, but reporters kept bugging Josh Earnest, a young staffer, who sheepishly approached his boss, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, with the ask. “No way,” Gibbs told him.

“Come on,” Earnest said. “The guy came all the way down here. Why don’t we just have him talk about all the stuff he’s doing?”

Gibbs reluctantly assented. Then Chu took the podium to tell the tiny island nation that it might soon, sorry to say, be underwater-which not only insulted the good people of Trinidad and Tobago but also raised the climate issue at a time when the White House wanted the economy, and the economy only, on the front burner. “I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans, and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes,” Chu said. “This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. … The island states … some of them will disappear.”

Earnest slunk backstage. “OK, we’ll never do that again,” he said as Gibbs glared. A phone rang. It was White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel calling Messina to snarl, “If you don’t kill [Chu], I’m going to.”

As Air Force One headed back to Washington, Messina found Chu-who has “no recollection” of this exchange, a person close to him says-sitting at the long table in the plane’s conference room. “What did you say?” Messina demanded, according to a witness. “What were you thinking?” he yelled. “And how, exactly, was this fucking on message?”

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The staffers who rule Obama’s West Wing often treat his Cabinet as a nuisance: At the top of the pecking order are the celebrity power players, like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to be warily managed; at the bottom, what they see as a bunch of well-intentioned political naifs only a lip-slip away from derailing the president’s agenda. Chu might have been the first Obama Cabinet secretary to earn the disdain of White House aides, but he was hardly the last.

“We are completely marginalized … until the shit hits the fan,” says one former Cabinet deputy secretary, summing up the view of many officials I interviewed. “If your question is: Did the president rely a lot on his Cabinet as a group of advisers? No, he didn’t,” says former Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

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“Going into D.C., I didn’t know the political side. I knew the science and technology side,” recalls Chu, who today professes thinly veiled disdain for the people who “hover around”-the political types who felt little compunction about condescending to a Nobel Prize winner. “It took me a while to realize that one’s own instincts and judgments are sometimes better than the people that have been on the scene for a while.”

What Walmart Could Learn from Henry Ford

Robert Reich

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Walmart just reported shrinking sales for a third straight quarter. What’s going on? Explained William S. Simon, the CEO of Walmart, referring to the company’s customers, “their income is going down while food costs are not. Gas and energy prices, while they’re abating, I think they’re still eating up a big piece of the customer’s budget.”

Walmart’s CEO gets it. Most of Walmart’s customers are still in the Great Recession, grappling with stagnant or declining pay. So, naturally, Walmart’s sales are dropping.

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Walmart could learn a thing or two from Henry Ford, who almost exactly a century ago decided to pay his workers three times the typical factory wage at the time. The Wall Street Journal called Ford a traitor to his class but he proved to be a cunning businessman.

Ford’s decision helped boost factory wages across the board – enabling so many working people to buy Model Ts that Ford’s revenues soared far ahead of his increased payrolls, and he made a fortune.

So why can’t Walmart learn from Ford? Because Walmart’s business model is static, depending on cheap labor rather than increased sales, and it doesn’t account for Walmart’s impact on the rest of the economy.

You can help teach Walmart how much power its consumers have: Stand with its workers who deserve a raise, and boycott Walmart on the most important sales day of the year, November 29.

Transcript

The Most Nefarious Part Of The TPP Proposal: Making Copyright Reform Impossible

by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt

Thu, Nov 14th 2013 12:02pm

Watch closely, and you’ll see supporters of TPP, and especially USTR (United States Trade Representative) employees, make the claim that nothing or almost nothing in the TPP will require legal changes in the US. They’ll say that this is just about “harmonizing” norms across borders to make it easier for businesses to do business internationally. This is a lie.

It’s a lie in two different ways. First, there are multiple provisions in here that will absolutely require changes to US law. We’ll discuss a few in other posts, but what’s much more nefarious and downright obnoxious, is that this would lock in a variety of really bad copyright policies, making it nearly impossible for Congress to go back and change them. And that’s a real issue, because, as we’ve been discussing, Congress is actually discussing copyright reform again. The head of the US Copyright Office, Maria Pallante, has proposed a bunch of changes to copyright law (some good, some bad), and astoundingly, just as Congress is at least trying to have the discussion about whether or not those and other ideas make sense, the USTR is looking to effectively tie everyone’s hands by saying “these things cannot be changed,” including many of the reforms that Pallante has directly proposed.

That’s really quite incredible if you think about it. On the one hand, you have the very head of the Copyright Office suggesting some reforms, and you have Congress beginning the process to explore that. On the other, you have the USTR totally ignoring the sole power of Congress to make copyright and patent law, and effectively saying “you cannot make any of the suggested reforms.” And then the USTR has the gall to ask Congress to give up its power to challenge specific provisions in the agreement? While we’re concerned about the Congressional copyright reform process, at least it’s being done in the open. The USTR has been hashing out the plan in TPP in total secrecy for years.

Who the hell does the USTR think they are that they can flat out override the Constitution and the Congressional process, and effectively block them in and stop any meaningful attempt at copyright reform? All done via a process driven entirely by a few special interests? It’s anti-democracy. It’s pure corporate cronyism by the worst cronies around.

Occupy Wall Street activists buy $15m of Americans’ personal debt

Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian

Tuesday 12 November 2013 10.34 EST

Rolling Jubilee, set up by Occupy’s Strike Debt group following the street protests that swept the world in 2011, launched on 15 November 2012. The group purchases personal debt cheaply from banks before “abolishing” it, freeing individuals from their bills.

By purchasing the debt at knockdown prices the group has managed to free $14,734,569.87 of personal debt, mainly medical debt, spending only $400,000.

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The group is able to buy debt so cheaply due to the nature of the “secondary debt market”. If individuals consistently fail to pay bills from credit cards, loans, or medical insurance the bank or lender that issued the funds will eventually cut its losses by selling that debt to a third party. These sales occur for a fraction of the debt’s true values – typically for five cents on the dollar – and debt-buying companies then attempt to recoup the debt from the individual debtor and thus make a profit.

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(Andrew Ross, a member of Strike Debt and professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University says) “Very few people know how cheaply their debts have been bought by collectors. It changes the psychology of the debtor, knowing this.

“So when you get called up by the debt collector, and you’re being asked to pay the full amount of your debt, you now know that the debt collector has bought your debt very, very cheaply. As cheaply as we bought it. And that gives you moral ammunition to have a different conversation with the debt collector.”

Occupy Wall Street’s debt buying strikes at the heart of capitalism

Alex Andreou, The Guardian

Wednesday 13 November 2013 11.20 EST

When the Occupy movement came into being in the summer of 2011, its critics said that a lack of identifiable objectives and strategy for achieving them meant it was doomed to fail. This was a monumental underestimation of its potential impact. Two years on, the debate about the ethics of corporate capitalism in its current form, the fairness of the remuneration of those at the top, the widening wealth gap and the morality of tax avoidance is alive and well. The concept of the “99%” is now part of the collective consciousness. All this is, in no small part, down to the fuse lit by the Occupy movement.

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One of the most significant, and perhaps the most threatening to the status quo, is the Strike Debt group, of which the Rolling Jubilee project forms part.

The idea is that, those freed from debt and those sympathetic to the movement, then donate into the fund to keep it “rolling” forward; hence the name. The fund has already raised $600,000 and has used $400,000 of this to purchase and cancel an astonishing $14.7m of debt, primarily focusing on medical bills. This strikes at the very heart of the system, not only by using its own perverse rules against it, but critically by revealing the illusory and circular nature of debt.

Capitalism requires a layer of cheap, flexible labour to operate optimally. It is not a coincidence that the most successful global economy, by any traditional capitalist measure, is an authoritarian quasi-communist state. Many, myself included, have been arguing that our current predicament is not crisis-consequent austerity, but a permanent adjustment. David Cameron on Monday confirmed as much. The great lie, peddled by Thatcher and Reagan, was the idea that we could all be middle class, white-collar professionals within a neoliberal economy. It was simply not true.

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This is why the debate on the back-door privatisation of medical and education services in this country matters so much. The extraction of profit from these two key areas changes the social contract in a fundamental way. The idea is no longer that the state will educate you and keep you healthy, so that you may continue to contribute with both your work and your taxes. It has mutated instead into “you will borrow money from the state’s private partners in order to become educated and stay healthy, so that you may continue to contribute to their bottom line”. All of the 99%, in a very real way, work in part for an assortment of financial institutions, largely invisible and certainly unaccountable.

Iceland’s – strangely unreported – decision to write down mortgage debt for its citizens, undermines that notion. A rejection of traditional systems of credit and money as a response to austerity, such as in the barter markets of Volos in Greece and Turin in Italy undermines that notion. The Rolling Jubilee project undermines that notion in a significant way, by asking the sizzling question: “If a corporation is prepared to accept five cents on the dollar in exchange for our debts, if that is our debt’s open market value, how much do we really owe?”

As it turns out Dylan Davies’ book The Embassy House which was the basis of the 60 Minutes Benghazi report by Lara Logan is published by Threshold, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is a division of…

Wait for it.

CBS.

It has been withdrawn from publication.

Nothing to see here.  Move along.

(h/t Heather @ Crooks and Liars)

For many people their faith in the government narrative of events, their trust in elected officials and our governing elites began on a November day in Dallas 50 years ago.

Now being 120+ years old and living through the lies of the Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations this was no surprise to me.  Heck, I remember the McKinley assassination.

Ah, it was a simpler time.  Filled with ignorance, bigotry, and greed.  Corporate titans of vast wealth and power were threatening to subvert our Democracy through the bribery and corruption of Washington D.C. politicians.

It was a lone gunman, a crazy anarchist.  Of course it was.

When Kennedy was killed, the official narrative was immediately questioned. Nearly five decades later, a new poll has found a clear majority of Americans still suspect there was a conspiracy behind the assassination. However, according to the Associated Press JFK poll, the percentage of those who believe accused shooter Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is at its highest level since the mid-’60s. The survey, conducted in mid-April, said 59 percent of Americans think multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president, while 24 percent think Oswald acted alone, 16 percent are still unsure. A 2003 Gallup poll found 75 percent of Americans felt there was a conspiracy.

Transcript

Monsanto Wins Again: Voters Reject Washington GMO Labeling Initiative

By Mike Ludwig, Truthout

Thursday, 07 November 2013 13:27

Voters in Washington on Tuesday rejected Initiative 522, a ballot measure to label groceries containing genetically engineered ingredients that was leading in the polls for weeks before big biotech and processed food companies injected millions of dollars into the campaign, including more than $7 million in allegedly illegal donations from a trade group that concealed its corporate donors.

Some mail-in votes still need to be counted, and the Yes on 522 group had yet to concede as of Thursday morning, but Washington state officials reported that 54 percent of voters opposed Initiative 522 and 45.9 percent supported labeling. The No on 522 campaign had already claimed victory.

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The campaign was the most expensive in the state’s history, drawing national attention and millions of dollars in out-of-state campaign cash. The No on 522 campaign raised an unprecedented $22 million, largely from big biotech firms and junk food companies. The Yes on 522 raised almost $8 million from GMO opponents and natural foods and products companies.

The Grocery Manufacturers of America donated $11 million from its member companies to No on 522 and was sued by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson in October for concealing donors. The trade group then voluntarily revealed that members such as Pepsico ($2.4 million), Coca-Cola ($1.5 million) and Nestle ($1.5 million) gave hefty donations to defeat the labeling initiative.

The trade group began planning for the campaign about a year ago after it joined Monsanto and other labeling opponents in raising a whopping $46 million to defeat a similar GMO labeling initiative in California last year. At the time, the Grocery Manufacturers Association directed its employees to “scope out a funding mechanism to address the GMO issue . . . while better shielding individual companies from attack for providing funding,” according to evidence cited in the attorney general’s complaint.

With its record-breaking war chest, the No on 522 campaign beat back labeling proponents in the polls with flashy mailers and ad blitzes on radio and television. Labeling, opponents argued, would raise food prices, confuse consumers and hurt farmers. The campaign looked a lot like the “no” campaign in California and shared many of the same corporate donors, including biotech companies such as Monsanto, which spent $8 million in California and more than $5 million in Washington.

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Despite victories for labeling opponents in Washington and California, a number of polls show that Americans overwhelmingly support GMO labeling. Most recently, a New York Times poll in July showed that 93 percent of American voters support labeling food with GMO ingredients.

Monsanto Calls Out the Dogs in St. Louis: New Anger, Old Crimes Point to Reparations

By Don Fitz, Barbara Chicherio and William Smith, Truthout

Thursday, 07 November 2013 09:03

The days of Monsanto greeting protesters at its World Headquarters (MWH) with balloons and pitchers of water are over. When 500 to 700 showed up for the October 12, 2013, March Against Monsanto (MAM), scores of police from half a dozen municipalities were there, several with dogs.

Also gone were police attempts to micromanage demonstrators. During a previous demonstration, police told picketers to stand on the pavement and not on Monsanto’s grass. At the next event, cops said that the pavement was too close to traffic and ordered people to stand on the grass. October 12 was noticeable by the absence of police commands concerning where to stand. At first, they seemed to have given up on controlling the increasingly large crowd.

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In some ways, the protest at the MWH was similar to others involving 2 million people around the world. Food was the big issue of the day. People were outraged at Monsanto’s reckless pursuit of putting genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into food with unknown effects for consumers, especially children. They unleashed their anger at the company’s attempts to manipulate the world food supply. At its attacks on farmers. At the havoc that GMOs wreak on wildlife. And at the company’s complicity with land grabs for planting GMO monocultures in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

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But the St. Louis event differed from other actions around the world. Because Monsanto originated in St. Louis, many nearby areas continue to be contaminated from its chemical past. These include East St. Louis, Illinois; Carter Carburetor in north St. Louis; and the Times Beach incinerator site, which burned dioxin (and probably Monsanto’s PCBs) in the 1990s.

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St. Louis is not waiting with baited breath for Monsanto to do the right thing. Exactly the opposite occurred in its official response to actions of October 12: “While we respect that people can have different points of view, we hope that St. Louisans know Monsanto people for their role in the community and know the Monsanto company for its commitment to St. Louis.” This weak response highlights that Monsanto has a crumbling global image because its lies of ending world poverty, selling safe products and using environmentally sound practices are no longer believed.

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Cries for reparations will not bring joy to Monsanto. As opposition expands beyond objecting to its crimes and includes demands for compensation to all of its victims, demonstrators may see fewer Monsanto balloons with happy faces and more police dogs.