NEWS2U MediaThe Truth Mainstream Media Avoids

2012-02-09T10:22:00.000-05:00

DemocracyNow interviews former Economic Hitman John Perkins

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is John Perkins' fast-paced autobiography, which reveals his career as an economist for an international consulting firm. Perkins says he was actually an "Economic Hit Man." His job was to convince countries that are strategically important to the United States to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development and to make sure that the lucrative projects were contracted to U.S. corporations.

Perkins defines economic hit men as "highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign ‘aid' organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization."

Confessions of an Economic Hitman Part 1

Confessions of an Economic Hitman Part 2

The Truth Behind the Greek Economic Crisis

Author John Perkins spoke at Marlboro College on 4/23/08. Drawing on experiences described in his two New York Times bestsellers, Perkins describes the post-WWII era as one that created history's first truly global empire -- mostly through economics, rather than the military. Now we find ourselves catapulted toward a future that appears catastrophic to many people; however, in Perkins's view it offers great opportunities. Identifying corporations as "the most influential institutions on the planet," he challenges us to transform ourselves and the companies that so deeply impact our lives. He presents a plan for creating a world "that will make our children proud of us."

John Perkins spent three decades as an Economic Hit Man, business executive, author, and lecturer. He lived and worked in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and North America. Then he made a decision: he would use these experiences to make the planet a better place for his daughters generation. Today he teaches about the importance of rising to higher levels of consciousness, to waking up -- in both spiritual and physical realms -- and is a champion for environmental and social causes.

The Secret History of the American Empire

John Perkins
New York Times Bestselling Author:
To learn about John’s NEW BOOK, Hoodwinked, (Nov 2009),
please subscribe to ”Newsletter” at
www.JohnPerkins.org
www.dreamchange.org

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The Secret History of the American Empire
Shapeshifting
The World Is As You Dream It
Psychonavigation
The Stress-Free Habit

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2012-01-30T20:50:00.000-05:00

Conservative Media Scramble To Turn An Oil Pipeline Into A Job Factory

by Jocelyn Fong, Shauna Theel
Media Matters
January 19, 2012

For months conservative media have advocated on behalf of TransCanada Corporation, the Canadian company seeking to build the Keystone XL pipeline through the U.S. to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico.

After opposing every major effort under the Obama administration to stimulate the economy, conservative media -- led by Fox News -- have claimed that the pipeline should be approved because it would provide jobs even as it threatens the environment.

Their job figures rely on industry-funded studies, and at times even grossly exaggerate those estimates. Watch as they struggle to get on the same page regarding which inflated estimate to use:

Source:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201201190008
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2012-01-30T08:21:00.001-05:00

Megaupload: A Lot Less Guilty Than You Think

Posted by Jennifer
The Shout
Jan. 26, 2012

The recent Department of Justice decision to indict Megaupload for copyright infringement and related offenses raises some very thorny questions from a criminal law perspective. A few preliminaries: I’m responsible for the musings below, but I thankRobert Weisberg of Stanford Law School for taking the time to talk through the issues and giving me pointers to some relevant cases. Also, an indictment contains unproven allegations, and the facts may well turn out to be different, or to imply different things in full context.

DMCA SAFE HARBOR: BELIEVE IT AND IT WILL BECOME REAL
As a matter of criminal law, the discussion of whether Megaupload did what it needed to do to qualify for the DMCA Safe Harbor misses the point. Did they register an agent? Did they have a repeat infringer policy? These are all interesting CIVIL questions. But from a criminal law perspective, the important question is did Defendants BELIEVE they were covered by the Safe Harbor? This is because criminal infringement requires a showing of willfulness. The view of the majority of Federal Courts is that “willfulness” means a desire to violate a known legal duty, not merely the will to make copies.

In other words, for criminal liability, it doesn’t really matter whether the service qualifies, so long as Defendants believed it qualified. If so, they were not intentionally violating a known legal duty, and so their conduct would not satisfy the willfulness element of the offense. For criminal liability after the DMCA safe harbor, as in horseshoes, close may be good enough.

SECONDARY COPYRIGHT LIABILITY AND CRIMINAL LAW
The heart of this case is whether and when an enterprise can be held criminally liable for the conduct of its users. (For example, both copyright infringement claims (Counts 4 and 5) identify aiding and abetting as a basis for the charge.)

Aiding and abetting is something like the civil liability inducement theory the U.S. Supreme Court created in the 2005 Grokster case. Experts opine that the indictment makes out a pretty good inducement case against Megaupload. But the first question from a defense perspective has to be “Can the Grokster theory of CIVIL liability even be the basis for CRIMINAL copyright claims?” This has never been decided by any Court.

However, the pending Second Circuit case of Puerto 80 Projects v. USA (“Rojadirecta“), raises the issue squarely. There, the plaintiff is challenging the ICE seizure of its Rojadirecta domain names based on an allegation of criminal copyright infringement. For background on the case, and on the ICE domain seizures, check out Techdirt’s coverage.

Rojadirecta’s lawyers at Durie Tangri have challenged the U.S. Government’s assertion that criminal liability arises from linking to infringing content. The lawyers argue that judge-made secondary infringement liability theories, including Grokster style inducement, cannot be the basis for a criminal copyright violation because the criminal copyright statute doesn’t mention secondary liability. Congress considered and rejected statutes that would have created such liability, in COICA and PROTECT IP. In sum, due process doesn’t allow incarceration under a civil legal theory that the Supreme Court dreamed up in 2005. The issues yet to be decided in Rojadirecta apply to the Megaupload case as well.

AGREEMENT + CIVIL VIOLATION = PRISON?
Count 2 is a conspiracy to commit copyright infringement claim, and references unknown parties as members of the conspiracy. Conspiracy entails an agreement to commit an offense and an overt act in furtherance of that agreement. The act in furtherance need not itself be illegal, but there must be an agreement to do an illegal act. The list of overt acts show that the object of the conspiracy was infringement by Mega users. If Defendants agreed with each other to induce others to infringe, and Rojadirecta’s lawyers are correct that inducement is not a crime, there’s a conspiracy only to violate a CIVIL law. If the idea is that Mega conspired with its users to infringe, those users may or may not have been criminally infringing copyright. They were located all over the world, and may or may not have acted willfully, i.e. intended to violate U.S. law. Again, the government would basically have alleged an agreement to violate a U.S. CIVIL law, including by many people who are not subject to U.S. rules.

Is it a federal crime to conspire to induce others to violate a U.S. civil law?

The answer to that is an obvious “no”. The conspiracy statute itself makes clear that the object of the conspiracy must be an offense or fraud against the United States, in other words, a federal crime. 18 U.S.C. 371. It is true that Oliver North and John Poindexter were prosecuted for conspiracy to violate Boland Amendment, which prohibited Defense Department spending on the Nicaraguan Contras, but was not itself a crime. And there is a 1979 case (U.S. v. Ruffin, 613 F.2d 408 (2nd cir. 1979), where the defendant was convicted of conspiracy when he convinced an unwitting person to divert federal funds to the defendant’s personal benefit. But both cases constituted fraud involving U.S.taxpayer dollars, which is also a basis for conspiracy liability. Civil violations simply are not.

For these reasons, prosecuting this case against Mega, especially if Defendants get good criminal lawyers who also understand copyright law, is going to be an uphill battle for the government.

A few other points. Some direct infringement convictions look easy, but COUNT 4 IS WEIRDLY INCOMPLETE
I agree with the copyright law experts interviewed by Ars Technica that the most damning allegations in the indictment are the claims of direct infringement, particularly for the prerelease movies. Interestingly, the indictment identifies four films that the defendants supposedly distributed before release: The Green Hornet, Thor, Bad Teacher, Twilight–Breaking Dawn Part 1. But Count 4 only charges one such act of prerelease infringement, the movie Taken. What about the other films? Why were those not also charged?

Finally, this case is extremely interesting from a JURISDICTIONAL standpoint. One of the very first issue to be litigated will be extradition to the United States. Does the United States have jurisdiction over anyone who uses a hosting provider in the Eastern District of Virginia? What about over any company that uses PayPal? That’s a very broad claim of power, and I expect it will be vigorously contested.

Source:
http://www.granick.com/blog/?p=739
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2012-01-27T21:38:00.001-05:00

After Journalist Arrests, U.S. Plummets in Global Press Freedom Rankings

by Josh Stearns
SavetheNews.org
January 25, 2012

In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama called for a “renewal of American values.” However, over the course of his wide-ranging speech, he made no mention of one core value: the fundamental role of the free press in America.

This absence was highlighted this morning when Reporters Without Borders released its 2011–2012 global Press Freedom Index. After months of journalist arrests and press suppression at Occupy Wall Street-inspired protests, the United States has dropped significantly in the rankings.

According to this report, the U.S. has dropped 27 places to 47th in the world. This is especially troubling as we head into an election year which is sure to spark new conflicts between police and press covering rallies, protests and political events.

And these Occupy arrests are not isolated incidents. According to organizations like the Society for Professional Journalists, the National Press Photographers Association and the Committee to Protect Journalists, the arrests at Occupy events are part of a growing trend in the U.S. and worldwide.

President Obama has often made media reform and press freedom part of his platform. As a candidate he called for Internet freedom, greater media diversity and limits on media consolidation. “The arc of human progress has been shaped by individuals with the freedom to assemble,” Obama said in a speech at the United Nations in 2009, “and by organizations outside of government that insisted upon democratic change and by free media that held the powerful accountable.”

Just last year, at the White House Correspondents Dinner, President Obama directly addressed press freedom and violence toward journalists. He said:

“You know, in the last months, we've seen journalists threatened, arrested, beaten, attacked and in some cases even killed simply for doing their best to bring us the story, to give people a voice and to hold leaders accountable. And through it all, we've seen daring men and women risk their lives for the simple idea that no one should be silenced, and everyone deserves to know the truth.

“That's what you do. At your best that's what journalism is. That's the principle that you uphold. It is always important, but it's especially important in times of challenge, like the moment that America and the world is facing now.”

It’s time to confront this issue head on. We can’t take the First Amendment for granted, and we need to open up a national discussion about the role of the media and freedom of the press in our democracy.

The media landscape is changing at a profound rate, and we must ensure that our policies and institutions keep pace. If, as President Obama asserts, we need a renewal of American values, then the First Amendment should be high on our list.

Free Press is a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media. Free Press does not support or oppose any candidate for public office. Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media and universal access to communications.

PRESS FREEDOM INDEX 2011/2012

Sources:
http://www.savethenews.org/blog/12/01/25/after-journalist-arrests-us-plummets-global-press-freedom-rankings
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2012-01-21T19:51:00.000-05:00

Megaupload didn’t ruin the economy, Wall Street did. One gets shut down, other gets bonuses.

By Chris in Paris
AmericaBlog News
Jan. 20, 2012

Putting aside whether Megaupload is truly dangerous and a pirate haven or not, it didn't cause the global economic collapse. Yet it was shut down yesterday, while the barons of Wall Street remain unscathed.

Megaupload had nothing to do with the ugly unemployment numbers that are likely to stick around for years. It had nothing to do with families being thrown out of their homes.

It had nothing to do with retirement accounts being slashed in half.

It had nothing to do with the rapidly increasing divide between the middle class and the super-rich.

It had nothing to do a lousy economy that is going to hang around for many more years.

How is it possible that the feds can organize a global program to hunt down the owners of a Web site and shut it down (protecting the 1%) when they can't even be bothered to prosecute Wall Street for ruining the economy (again protecting the 1%)?

Outside of the movie and music industry, few give a damn about Megaupload - but everyone still cares a lot about the crisis that Wall Street brought down on our heads and pocketbooks. We also continue to be upset that Wall Street bonuses - even though they are being reduced - will still be considerably more than most Americans can expect to get for years to come.

Even people working in industries with similar experience and backgrounds don't make the crazy money that is still being offered on Wall Street.

How about some real justice for a known problem rather than this side show to make the movie and music industry happy.

Source:
http://www.americablog.com/2012/01/megaupload-didnt-ruin-economy-wall.html
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2012-01-18T07:57:00.002-05:00

Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA.

The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel. Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/sopa-pipa/

STOP SOPA

http://news2umedia.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html#55969514831571283
http://onecandleinthedark.blogspot.com
http://www.cbsyousuck.com
http://www.justart.net

A rapidly growing community

Opposition to the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) grows with each day. This brief list is just a sampling of businesses. Visit the Center for Democracy and Technology’s list for a more complete look at the individuals, organizations, experts and legislators that know how bad this legislation could be.

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2012-01-07T14:15:00.000-05:00

Arms Dealer Obama Will Win by Default

By Robert Scheer
The Nation
January 5, 2012

Barack Obama will be re-elected not as a vindication of his policies but because the Republicans are incapable of providing a reasonable challenge to his flawed performance. On the central issue of our time—reining in the greed of the multinational corporations, led by the financial sector and the defense industry—a Republican presidential victor, with the possible exception of the now-sidelined Ron Paul, would do far less to challenge the kleptocracy of corporate-dominated governance.

As compared to front-runner Mitt Romney, who wants to derail even Obama’s tepid efforts at regulating Wall Street, and who seeks ever more wasteful increases in military spending, the incumbent president appears relatively enlightened, but that is cold comfort.

Not only has Obama been a savior of the banking conglomerates that so generously financed his campaign, but he also has proved to be equally as solicitous of the needs of the military-industrial complex.

He entered his re-election year by signing a $662 billion defense authorization bill that strips away some of our most fundamental liberties and keeps military spending at Cold War levels, and by approving a $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

Those two actions represent an obvious contradiction, since the attack on American soil that kept defense spending so high in the post-9/11 decade was carried out by 15 Saudis and four other men directed by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi primarily using funding from his native land.

Now Saudi Arabia is to be protected as a holdout against the democratic impulse of the Arab Spring because it is our ally against Iran, a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11. Saudi Arabia, it should be recalled, was one of only three nations, along with the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, to recognize the Taliban government that harbored bin Laden before 9/11.

This is the same Saudi monarchy that rushed its forces into Bahrain last March to crush a popular uprising. But that doesn’t trouble the Obama administration; for two years it has been aggressively pushing the Saudi arms deal, which includes $30 billion in fighter jets built by Boeing.

Forget human rights or the other good stuff Democrats love to prattle on about. As White House spokesman Josh Earnest put it: “This agreement reinforces the strong and enduring relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia and demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a strong Saudi defense capability as a key component to regional security.”

The rationale for the first big arms deal with the tyrannical Saudi monarchy since 1992 is that a better-armed Sunni theocracy is needed to counter the threat from the Shiite theocracy in Iran. Once again the U.S. is stoking religious-based fratricide, just as we did in Iraq.

Only this time, we are on the side of Saudi Sunnis oppressing Shiites both at home and in neighboring Bahrain. That oppression—along with a U.S. invasion that replaced Tehran’s sworn enemy in Sunni-led Baghdad with a Shiite leadership that had long been nurtured by Iran’s ayatollahs—is what enhances the regional influence of Iran.

If Iran ever does pose a regional military threat because of its nuclear program or any other reason, real or concocted, it will be NATO forces that will take out the threat, not the Saudis, who will still be polishing their latest-model F-15s as icons of a weird conception of modernism.

The real reason for this deal is that it is the only sort of jobs program that Democrats are capable of pushing through an obstructive Congress. The administration boasts that the arms package will result in 50,000 jobs in 44 states, underscoring the warning from Dwight Eisenhower, the last progressive Republican president, about the power of a military-industrial complex that has tentacles in every congressional district.

As Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, an Armed Services Committee member who championed this sale, put it: “The F-15 is a world-class aircraft built by hardworking folks right here in St. Louis. I am thrilled for all of the skilled men and women on the F-15 line that this important, big order that I have stood side-by-side with them in working to secure is finally happening.”

A Democrat running for re-election, McCaskill added, “These are important jobs in our community. I will continue advocating for sales of Boeing products wherever appropriate.” Being a good Democrat, she doesn’t reference Boeing’s profits, which are increasingly dependent upon arming the rest of the world.

That’s the win-win of government-generated profits and jobs on which the Democrats are counting to defeat the Republicans, both through campaign contributions from the more rational among the wealthy and the votes of ordinary people who, despite being seriously hurt in this economy, have nowhere else to turn.

Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.

This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.

Source:
http://www.thenation.com/article/165463/arms-dealer-obama-will-win-default
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2012-01-02T09:14:00.001-05:00

Eurozone crisis: Foreign Office plans evacuation of expatriates

Britons living in Spain and Portugal could get government help to leave the countries if the crisis in the eurozone sends their banks into meltdown.

By Donna Bowater
Telegraph UK
Dec. 18, 2011
[video & emphasis added]

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Treasury is putting measures in place to help evacuate thousands of expatriates living in Spain and Portugal in case they are stranded no access to their savings.

The two countries, which both have sizeable British populations, were among those made vulnerable by the "sustained deterioration" in funding.

Spain was warned by credit rating agency Fitch that it was facing a debt downgrade along with Italy, while Ireland, Belgium, Slovenia and Cyprus were also given the warning.

Meanwhile, around one million Britons live in Spain with around 50,000 in Portugal.

The Foreign Office said it was concerned they could be cut off from their accounts if the countries' banks called in loans.

A source told the Sunday Times (£) the Government was considering chartering planes, ships and coaches to bring expats back to the UK.

“The nuclear scenario would be having thousands of Brits stranded at the airports in Spain and Portugal with no way to get money from the cash dispenser and no way to get home. Who would be blamed for this? The Foreign Office," an official said.

“We are looking at how we can help evacuate them if the banks in Spain and Portugal collapse, getting people cash, things like that, sending planes. We did similar things in Lebanon in 2006. We are coordinating with the Treasury.”

Financial aid could also be sent to expats, many of whom are retired and living on small incomes.
A Treasury spokesman said: "Of course we plan for a range of contingencies. We are not going into the specifics of what we are planning for."

Last month, it was reported that the Foreign Office had asked embassies and consulates for contingency plans for rioting and social unrest in countries most affected by the eurozone crisis.

Diplomats were told to prepare for an evacuation of tens for/of thousands of British citizens as a banking collapse could mean they would be unable to withdraw cash.

An FCO spokesperson said: "Officials continue to contingency plan for a range of possible scenarios."

Related Articles:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8917077/Prepare-for-riots-in-euro-collapse-Foreign-Office-warns.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/andrew-gilligan/8963457/EU-hands-out-holidays-paid-for-by-taxpayer.html

Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/8963947/Eurozone-crisis-Foreign-Office-plans-evacuation-of-expatriates.html
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2011-12-28T11:39:00.006-05:00

Big media wants to criminalize the world - including you!

One of the biggest scams of the century and You thought the banks were bad?

SOPA, It's a Trojan Horse... SOPA, the so-called "Stop Online Piracy Act."

Big Media companies spent 10 years and made millions of dollars giving away file sharing software and taught millions of kids how to specifically use it to pirate copyrighted material.

Now they're spending $100 million+ lobbying Congress to turn the very same behavior they facilitated into a felony.

The goal: a multi-billion pay day suing individual Internet users for "criminal" infringement. (They've already started.) And you and your kids may be next in their gunsights.

The commentator on this video is a brash and loud, but stick with it. He's got the facts cold.

Do you get this?

Singers Songwriters and Performing Artists have joined Internet media mogul Alki David and have re-filed a massive copyright infringement lawsuit implicating millions and potentially billions of dollars in revenues obtained by CBS subsidiaries CNET and CBS Interactive by fostering and popularizing piracy of copyrighted works.

The big media companies spent TEN YEARS giving away file sharing software and encouraging people to use it.

Go to the following web sites for thousands of pages of evidence and links to the original source research on the Internet Wayback Machine. Add this link to the video on your Facebook page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJIuYgIvKsc to spread the word.

http://onecandleinthedark.blogspot.com
http://www.cbsyousuck.com
http://www.justart.net
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2011-12-16T19:35:00.001-05:00

'Music & Revolution: The Political is Personal'

Vanessa Daou
Dec. 9, 2011

From The Arab Spring uprisings to Occupy Wall Street, these last months have revealed an incendiary cultural and political landscape. Through the use of Social Media, we've become acutely aware that our lives are inextricably - inexorably - connected.

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2011-12-13T23:58:00.000-05:00

FBI using Carrier IQ info for "law enforcement purposes," refuses to release records

By Jon Brodkin
ARSTechnica
Dec. 13, 2011

An enterprising advocate for openness in government has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FBI for all information the agency uses related to Carrier IQ, the company under fire for monitoring user activity on smartphones—and his request was flatly denied.

The FBI claims data gathered by Carrier IQ software is exempt from disclosure laws because it is located in an investigative file that was "compiled for law enforcement purposes" and "could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings."

Michael Morisy, a journalist who founded an organization called MuckRock to ease the process of filing FOIA requests, wrote the FBI on Dec. 1 asking for "any manuals, documents or other written guidance used to access or analyze data gathered by programs developed or deployed by Carrier IQ.... In addition, I ask for expedited processing as this is a matter of immediate news interest: The existence of Carrier IQ's software was recently disclosed and has immediate ramifications on constitutionally protected privacy rights."

The FBI acknowledged receiving his request within a few days, and then issued a blanket denial, which cites a law exempting records from disclosure if releasing them could interfere with law enforcement proceedings. "In applying this exemption, I have determined that the records responsive to your request are law enforcement records; that there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records; and that release of the information contained in these responsive records could reasonably be expected to interfere with the enforcement proceedings," an FBI records management official named David Hardy wrote to Morisy.

As we noted in several stories in the past few weeks, Carrier IQ software is installed on more than 140 million phones, including various Androids and iPhones, although Apple says it is in the process of stripping it out.

Carrier IQ, handset manufacturers and wireless service providers have said the software is used only for diagnostic information to improve service, and that it is not used to record keystrokes or read users' messages.

However, the companies have faced questions from Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) and class-action lawsuits. How much data Carrier IQ collects from smartphones and what happens to it have not been fully answered, and the FBI's statement does not clarify whether it is investigating Carrier IQ to determine if its software violates any federal laws, or if it is using data from Carrier IQ for other investigations.

Morisy speculates that "What is still unclear is whether the FBI used Carrier IQ's software in its own investigations, whether it is currently investigating Carrier IQ, or whether it is some combination of both—not unlikely given the recent uproar over the practice coupled with the US intelligence communities reliance on third-party vendors. The response would seem to indicate at least the former, since the request was specifically for documents related directly to accessing and analyzing Carrier IQ data."

Morisy plans to appeal the FBI's denial of his public records request.

UPDATE: A Carrier IQ spokesperson has denied the company provided any information to the FBI, according to a report in VentureBeat. However, Carrier IQ data is provided to wireless carriers, so the FBI could have received the data in question from another source.

Source:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/fbi-using-carrier-iq-info-for-law-enforcement-purposes-refuses-to-release-records.ars
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2011-12-10T11:06:00.003-05:00

GOP Site Plans To Infiltrate Liberal Sites With “Trolls”

Right-wing website RedState.com has offered a comprehensive plan for its followers to infiltrate left-wing sites by pretending to be progressives to hurt the Democratic Party.

NewsOne.com

July 28, 2011

The list of directions created by the site are below.

First, infiltrate the site.
For this, you will have to avoid creating screen names like “GoPalinGo” or “Heartlandredstater.” Also, some websites may actually have you wait a week before you are allowed to comment or blog. Perhaps, they are investigating the e-mail address you give them against whether it is used for a conservative website. Be sure to avoid that tendency; if you use, for example, aol.com screen name for RedState, make sure you use a yahoo e-mail address for Dailykos, or whatever.

Once you are there, the second part of the strategy is to gain their trust.
For this, you cannot be too overtly gung-ho conservative in your outlook. Instead, you sort of have to be the voice of a moderate liberal. This will take a lot of acting skill, but it could be done. For example, over at ThinkProgress, they had an article about how the folks in Alabama got what they deserved with the recent spate of tornadoes because their legislators did not believe in global warming. It took all my energies not to reach through the Internet and strangle these kooks, but I responded, “Well, that might be going a little too far…” Along the way, I gained the trust of certain posters on that thread.

The third step is to move the conversation in the direction you desire.
By doing this, you can then form the debate in terms you can win. For example, in the above story, although I said they were going too far in their comments, I moved the conversation somewhat by questioning whether the folks in Alabama would accept Federal funds to rebuild their lives. In other words, the subject was changed from a debate on global warming to one of fiscal responsibility.

Once there, you can then highjack the thread. In effect, you have changed the subject and tenor or the conversation and the writer of the original post has lost their ability to moderate the conversation and that creates a free-for-all that gets the conversation far off the original mark.

Of course, you will be accused of “threadjacking” or, worse (drumrolls please…) being a “troll.” To this I say, of course you are a troll and you should be proud of it. Embrace your status of being a “troll” on the liberal website and carry it through to its logical conclusion.

To put it bluntly: Embrace your inner troll. If they realize what is happening and accuse you of being a troll or such, or if they try to block you and your opinions, remind them of their support for the Fairness Doctrine and their reasoning for it- to ensure that both sides have a say- should allow you to have your say. Force them to practice what they preach.

Read the whole Redstate Plan Here:
These articles were all posted by a Redstate user named "davenj1"
Googled "davenj 1"

Weakening the Democratic Base

Weakening the Democratic Base-Part 1: The Black Vote

Weakening the Democratic Base- Part 2: Labor Unions

Weakening the Democratic Base, Part 3: The Media

Weakening the Democratic Base, Part 4: The Liberal Elites

Weakening the Democratic Base, Part 5: Liberal Netroots
Weakening the Democratic Base, Part 6: Academia
Weakening the Democratic Base, Part 7: Gay Activism

Originating Articles
http://pastebin.com/ge9HKUTk #OpRedstate
http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/gop-site-plans-to-infiltrate-progressive-with-trolls/
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2011-12-04T18:32:00.000-05:00

Crisis: Who is Pulling the Strings?

By Daniel Estulin
Journalist Author
European Parliament Session
December 2, 2011

This is How Dictatorship Begins
Byoblu interviews Nigel Farage

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2011-11-29T18:56:00.001-05:00

The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality

by Naomi Wolf
Guardian UK
November 25, 2011

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened.

The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests.

Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalized police force, and forbids federal or militarized involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that right-wing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top.

This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilization against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping?

As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process.

No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3: was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies".

Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorize mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarized reactions against its own peaceful constituents?

The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. T

he inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organized Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent.

Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

Source:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/25-7
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2011-11-23T11:23:00.001-05:00

Buy Nothing Day!
Nov 25 / 26

#OCCUPYXMAS

2011-11-08T19:39:00.000-05:00

Will the 1% Steal Ohio's Labor Rights Referendum?

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
CommonDreams.org
November 6, 2011
[emphasis added]

Tuesday’s most important vote is the repeal of Ohio’s vicious anti-labor Issue 2.

Polls show the repeal winning by 20% or more. But will it---like the 2004 presidential election---be stolen by a 1% intent on crushing working people and stealing huge sums of money?

Like Wisconsin’s millionaire assault on the bargaining rights of public unions, the thoroughly bought Ohio legislature has passed a draconian law aimed at crippling the organizing ability of working people.

The attack has the loud, persistent support of Wall Street’s hand-picked Governor John Kasich, who made millions as a Foxist commentator and Lehman bond dealer. Among other things, Kasich helped pawn $400 million in Lehman’s junk bonds onto the Ohio teacher’s pension fund, making him a multi-millionaire. Control of that money would be directly affected by the outcome of this referendum.

The legislature’s original passage of the anti-labor bill drew thousands of demonstrators to the statehouse lawn and key locations throughout the Buckeye State. The pre-occupy rallies got ardent support from progressive, union and working people across Ohio’s political spectrum.

But the vast, apparently virtually limitless resources of corporate America have been polluting the Ohio media, distorting the nature of the vote, aiming to thoroughly confuse the voters, who must vote no on this issue to defeat the bill. Since corporations are now considered “people,” with no real limits on what can be spent, the corporate anti-labor deluge has been horrific.

But that’s only the beginning. In 2004, the Ohio’s GOP control of the governorship and Secretary of State’s office made possible the theft of the presidency for George W. Bush. Though highly sophisticated exit polls showed John Kerry winning the state by more than 4%, the “official” outcome had him losing Ohio’s 20 electoral votes---and thus the White House---by more than 2%.

By all credible estimates such a shift of more than 6% was a statistical impossibility. It was primarily engineered by Bush consigliere Karl Rove and Republican Secretary of J. Kenneth Blackwell.

Rove and Blackwell helped knock a half-million or more primarily Democratic voters were off Ohio's registration rolls prior to election day. Despite the obvious irregularities that defined the registration process, voting procedures, ballot tabulations and final electronic manipulations, John Kerry conceded Ohio---and the election---with more than 200,000 votes left uncounted.

In July of this year, www.freepress.org posted the architectural maps used in Blackwell’s 2004 voting operation in Ohio. His electronic reporting operation was designed by a partisan Republican firm, GovTech and linked directly to servers at the premier Republican and right-wing tech company SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In the 2005 election, a corporate coalition parallel to the one fighting to crush worker rights this year worked on a comparable Issue 2. In reaction to the theft of the vote in 2004, a popular uprising had designed that Issue 2 to make it easier for Ohioans to vote early by mail or in person.

Two days before the 2005 vote, the Republican-leaning Columbus Dispatch poll showed that Issue 2 passing by 26 points, 59% to 33%.

But, on that November 8 (the same day as this year’s vote), Blackwell oversaw the defeat of Issue 2 with the utterly implausible support of 63.5%. Once again, the shift from pre-election polling to final “official” vote count was a virtual statistical impossibility.

For Blackwell’s official vote tally to square with the pre-election Dispatch poll, there would have to have been an unprecedented 22% shift in the last days of the election cycle. Given the ability of the Ohio Secretary of State to easily manipulate voter registration and ballot counting, American democracy was severely crippled in that 2005 outcome, a defeat that may again come into play this Tuesday. (See http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1559 )

This time around, the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature has already attempted to disenfranchise 900,000 Ohio voters---nearly 20% of the overall electorate.

The vast majority of these newly disenfranchised citizens come from demographics indicating they are progressive voters who would vote to defeat Issue 2. Republican efforts came through HB 194, designed to make it difficult for the elderly, disabled, poor, and students to vote. Thankfully, a separate petition drive has temporarily blocked this latest reincarnaton of Jim Crow in the north.

But the GOP did kill early voting on the weekend before the election. This hugely successful expansion of the effective franchise had allowed tens of thousands of Ohioans to vote at public locations the Saturday and Sunday prior to the 2008 presidential election. This “excess of democracy” proved too much for the 1%, which got rid of it this year on the back of one of the legislature’s many anti-voter rights bills.

Greg Moore, head of the NAACP’s voting rights campaign, has said on Bob Fitrakis’s FIGHT BACK radio show (www.talktainmentradio.com) that Ohio’s Issue 2 may be the most important vote in the entire US this year. He also points out that in 2004 the right wing used a vote against gay marriage to attract conservative voters to the polls. This year the Republicans have put a symbolic anti-Obamacare Issue 3 on the ballot to draw out the same reactionary elements.

But the polling indicates that many of those who hate Obamacare also happen to be public employees, or friends and family of public employees – the targets of Issue 2.

Why is passing Issue 2 so important to these Republicans? If it passes, it will destroy the power of the public employee unions in the state. These unions remain the last base of money in Ohio politics for moderate, liberal and progressive candidates. The 1% has already been successful in destroying grassroots organizations that registered lower income voter, like ACORN.

Also, the pension funds the targeted unions protect contain hundreds of billions of dollars in workers assets.

Defanged unions would be easy prey for the likes of Kasich, the former Lehman Brothers Uber-Vulture who got rich with the sale of over $400 million of junk assets to the teacher’s pension before becoming governor.

Essentially the weakened unions could lose control of the pension boards and the looting would begin anew.

Thus, even though the forces of democracy and unionization seem to have a substantial lead going into Tuesday’s vote, no electoral tally in Ohio is a safe bet. The theft of the presidency in 2004, and the huge reversal of the pro-democracy margin for Issue 2 in 2005---more than 20%---should remind us all that where billions of dollars and the rights of working people are concerned, the 1% will stop at nothing to steal an election.

It has been done repeatedly in Ohio. It could be done again on Tuesday. Let’s do all in our power to make sure Buckeye history does not repeat itself as both tragedy and farce.

This article was first published at freepress.org.

Bob Fitrakis is a Political Science Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences department at Columbus State Community College. He and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?, As Goes Ohio: Election Theft Since 2004 , How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, and What Happened in Ohio

Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. His Solartopia Green Power Hour runs at www.talktainmentradio.com. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org. He and Bob Fitrakis have co-authored four books on election protection, including Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?, As Goes Ohio: Election Theft Since 2004 , How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, and What Happened in Ohio

Source:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/06-1
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2011-10-31T17:52:00.005-04:00

Police State?
Met police using surveillance system to monitor mobile phones

Civil liberties group raises concerns over Met police purchase of technology to track public handsets over a targeted area

By Ryan Gallagher and Rajeev Syal
Guardian.co.uk
October 30, 2011
[emphasis added]

Britain's largest police force is operating covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area.

The surveillance system has been procured by the Metropolitan police from Leeds-based company Datong plc, which counts the US Secret Service, the Ministry of Defence and regimes in the Middle East among its customers. Strictly classified under government protocol as "Listed X", it can emit a signal over an area of up to an estimated 10 sq km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minute to release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can be used to track a person's movements in real time.

The disclosure has caused concern among lawyers and privacy groups that large numbers of innocent people could be unwittingly implicated in covert intelligence gathering. The Met has refused to confirm whether the system is used in public order situations, such as during large protests or demonstrations.

Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, warned the technology could give police the ability to conduct "blanket and indiscriminate" monitoring: "It raises a number of serious civil liberties concerns and clarification is urgently needed on when and where this technology has been deployed, and what data has been gathered," he said. "Such invasive surveillance must be tightly regulated, authorised at the highest level and only used in the most serious of investigations. It should be absolutely clear that only data directly relating to targets of investigations is monitored or stored," he said.

Datong's website says its products are designed to provide law enforcement, military, security agencies and special forces with the means to "gather early intelligence in order to identify and anticipate threat and illegal activity before it can be deployed".

The company's systems, showcased at the DSEi arms fair in east London last month, allow authorities to intercept SMS messages and phone calls by secretly duping mobile phones within range into operating on a false network, where they can be subjected to "intelligent denial of service". This function is designed to cut off a phone used as a trigger for an explosive device.

A transceiver around the size of a suitcase can be placed in a vehicle or at another static location and operated remotely by officers wirelessly. Datong also offers clandestine portable transceivers with "covered antennae options available". Datong sells its products to nearly 40 countries around the world, including in Eastern Europe, South America, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. In 2009 it was refused an export licence to ship technology worth £0.8m to an unnamed Asia Pacific country, after the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills judged it could be used to commit human rights abuses.

A document seen by the Guardian shows the Metropolitan police paid £143,455 to Datong for "ICT hardware" in 2008/09. In 2010 the 37-year-old company, which has been publicly listed since October 2005, reported its pro forma revenue in the UK was £3.9m, and noted that "a good position is being established with new law enforcement customer groups". In February 2011 it was paid £8,373 by Hertfordshire Constabulary according to a transaction report released under freedom of information.

Between 2004 and 2009 Datong won over $1.6 (£1.03m) in contracts with US government agencies, including the Secret Service, Special Operations Command and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In February 2010 the company won a £750,000 order to supply tracking and location technology to the US defence sector. Official records also show Datong entered into contracts worth more than £500,000 with the Ministry of Defence in 2009.

All covert surveillance is currently regulated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), which states that to intercept communications a warrant must be personally authorised by the home secretary and be both necessary and proportionate. The terms of Ripa allow phone calls and SMS messages to be intercepted in the interests of national security, to prevent and detect serious crime, or to safeguard the UK's economic wellbeing.

Latest figures produced by the government-appointed interception of communications commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy, show there were 1,682 interception warrants approved by the home secretary in 2010. Public authorities can request other communications data – such as the date, time and location a phone call was made – without the authority of the home secretary. In 2010, 552,550 such requests were made, averaging around 1,500 per day.

Barrister Jonathan Lennon, who specialises in cases involving covert intelligence and Ripa, said the Met's use of the Datong surveillance system raised significant legislative questions about proportionality and intrusion into privacy.

"How can a device which invades any number of people's privacy be proportionate?" he said. "There needs to be clarification on whether interception of multiple people's communications – when you can't even necessarily identify who the people are – is complaint with the act. It may be another case of the technology racing ahead of the legislation. Because if this technology now allows multiple tracking and intercept to take place at the same time, I would have thought that was not what parliament had in mind when it drafted Ripa."

Former detective superintendent Bob Helm, who had the authority to sign off Ripa requests for covert surveillance during 31 years of service with Lancashire Constabulary, said: "It's all very well placed in terms of legislation … when you can and can't do it. It's got to be legal and obviously proportionate and justified. If you can't do that, and the collateral implications far outweigh the evidence you're going to get, well then you just don't contemplate it."

In May the Guardian revealed the Met had purchased software used to map suspects' digital movements using data gathered from social networking sites, satnav equipment, mobile phones, financial transactions and IP network logs. The force said the software was being tested using "dummy data" to explore how it could be used to examine "police vehicle movements, crime patterns and telephone investigations."

The Met would not comment on its use of Datong technology or give details of where or when it had been used.

A spokesman said: "The MPS [Metropolitan police service] may employ surveillance technology as part of our continuing efforts to ensure the safety of Londoners and detect criminality. It can be a vital and highly effective investigative tool.

"Although we do not discuss specific technology or tactics, we can re-assure those who live and work in London that any activity we undertake is in compliance with legislation and codes of practice."

A spokesman for the Home Office said covert surveillance was kept under "constant review" by the chief surveillance commissioner, Sir Christopher Rose, who monitors the conduct of authorities and ensures they are complying with the appropriate legislation.

He added: "Law enforcement agencies are required to act in accordance with the law and with the appropriate levels of authorisation for their activity."

Datong declined to comment.

Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/30/metropolitan-police-mobile-phone-surveillance
_________________

2011-10-28T21:52:00.002-04:00

CDC Director Arrested for Child Molestation and Bestiality

By Dr. Mercola
October 28, 2011

Dr. Kimberly Quinlan Lindsey, a top official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been arrested and charged with two counts of child molestation and one count of bestiality.

Dr. Lindsey, who joined the CDC in 1999, is currently the deputy director for the Laboratory Science Policy and Practice Program Office. She's second in command of the program office.

Prior to that role, she was the senior health scientist in the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, an office that oversees the allocation process for $1.5 billion in terrorism preparedness.

According to CNN:

"Authorities also charged Lindsey's live-in boyfriend, Thomas Joseph Westerman, 42, with two counts of child molestation.

The two are accused of 'immoral and indecent' sexual acts involving a 6-year-old ...

The bestiality charge says Lindsey 'did unlawfully perform or submit to any sexual act with an animal.'"

Between January and August last year, Dr. Lindsey and her boyfriend allegedly involved the child during sex, and DeKalb County police claim they discovered photographs of Lindsey performing sex acts on a couple of her pets.

Some of you may wonder why I've chosen to discuss this story. Some may think it's in poor taste and doesn't belong in a newsletter about health.

However, I believe it's relevant to be aware that someone in charge of your child's health is allegedly engaged in child abuse. Her actions raise serious questions in my mind about her level of concern for the health and well-being of children in general.

Dr. Lindsey Played Primary Role in Bogus Swine Flu Propaganda Campaign

As you may recall, the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic turned out to be a complete sham, with a fast-tracked and particularly dangerous vaccine being pushed as the sole remedy. Children and pregnant women were the primary targets of this dangerous vaccine. The H1N1 flu was a perfect example of how the CDC can brazenly distort reality, and often ignore and deny the dangerous and life-threatening side effects of their solution. As a result of this bogus propaganda campaign, thousands of people were harmed (and many died) worldwide.

In August, it was revealed that the 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine increased the risk for narcolepsy—a very rare and devastating sleeping disorder—in Swedish children and adolescents by 660 percent.

Finland also noticed a dramatic increase in narcolepsy following vaccination with Pandemrix. There, an interim report issued in January of this year found that the H1N1 vaccine increased the risk of narcolepsy by 900 percent in children and adolescents below the age of 19. In the US, the H1N1 flu vaccine was statistically linked with abnormally high rates of miscarriage and stillbirths. As reported by Steven Rubin on the NVIC's blog, the US H1N1 flu vaccine was SIXTY times more likely to be reported to VAERS to be associated with miscarriage than previous seasonal flu vaccines.

The only "winners" in this game were the pharmaceutical companies that received millions of dollars for this never-proven-effective and highly reactive vaccine, while being sheltered by our government from liability for any harm it caused.

Dr. Lindsey played an important role in that campaign, which ended in tragedy for countless many—not from a killer flu (statistically, the 2009 H1N1 flu was MILDER than usual) but from the dangerous and expensive "remedy" to this oversold non-threat.

All of that said, I do want to stress that Dr. Lindsey has not yet been found guilty, and there are still many unanswered questions relating to this case. But this is not the only shocking story raising questions about the ethics of those involved in creating the CDC's health recommendations.

The CDC's Stance on Water Fluoridation—Another Misleading Recommendation

Take water fluoridation for example.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that since the 1970's, the dental health professionals in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have had sole control over the agency's stance supporting water fluoridation.

The CDC is part of a larger administrative structure that provides intra-agency support and resource sharing for health issues that require the input from more than one area of expertise. Other offices that share information and expertise with the CDC include the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office of Minority Health and Health Equity, and the Agency for Toxic Substances. The general assumption has been that the agency used a broad range of expert input to evaluate fluoride before reaching the decision to support water fluoridation.

After all, since fluoride is swallowed, it stands to reason it may have an impact on your whole body, not just your teeth.

Yet the documents show that no CDC toxicologists, minority health professionals, experts in diabetes, or others outside the Oral Health Division had any input into the agency's position.

This flies in the face of what the agency claims, and what water-, health- and political leaders have believed about the way the CDC operates. Without these additional experts from other fields, can we reasonably believe that the agency has properly assessed the research on whole-body harm from fluoridation? The documents have drawn attention once again to the CDC's and EPA's fluoride safety statements, which appear completely at odds with current scientific knowledge, and the fact that no outside experts from related fields were ever included may very well explain this discrepancy.

CDC Doctor who "Debunked" Vaccine-Autism Link Indicted on Fraud

Another shocking case involving the CDC is that of Dr. Poul Thorsen, who, after being found to have falsified documents, was indicted on fraud, money laundering and tax evasion after stealing somewhere between $1-2 million in research grant money from the CDC.

Here you might wonder why I'm faulting the CDC, as the organization was the victim of fraud. The reason I fault them is because they hired Dr. Thorsen to debunk the link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism—which he did to their satisfaction. However, CDC officials may have played a significant role in "guiding" this research to their desired end, and now that Thorsen has been exposed as a fraud, the agency still upholds his research as being of high caliber.

As explained in a 2010 article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
"Thorsen was a leading member of a Danish research group that wrote several key studies supporting CDC's claims that the MMR vaccine and mercury-laden vaccines were safe for children. Thorsen's 2003 Danish study reported a 20-fold increase in autism in Denmark after that country banned mercury based preservatives in its vaccines. His study concluded that mercury could therefore not be the culprit behind the autism epidemic.

His study has long been criticized as fraudulent since it failed to disclose that the increase was an artifact of new mandates requiring, for the first time, that autism cases be reported on the national registry. This new law and the opening of a clinic dedicated to autism treatment in Copenhagen accounted for the sudden rise in reported cases rather than, as Thorsen seemed to suggest, the removal of mercury from vaccines.

Despite this obvious chicanery, CDC has long touted the study as the principal proof that mercury-laced vaccines are safe for infants and young children. Mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, has relied on this study as the basis for its public assurances that it is safe to inject young children with mercury -- a potent neurotoxin -- at concentrations hundreds of times over the U.S. safety limits."

Were CDC Officials in on the Fraud?

Emails released in response to FOIA filings by parents also show that Kreesten Madsen, one of Dr. Thorsen's research partners, had acquiesced to the wishes of CDC officials who wanted to cherry pick facts in order to prove vaccine safety. Furthermore, according to an April 28 report by Natural News:
"From February 2004 through June 2008, says the DOJ indictment, Thorsen allegedly submitted over a dozen fraudulent invoices requesting reimbursement for expenses that were fabricated. Interestingly, these allegedly fraudulent invoices were signed by a laboratory section chief at the CDC, indicating that someone inside the CDC was either duped by Thorsen or potentially involved in the alleged fraud.

… This is the great untold story of an alleged criminal ring operating inside the CDC, with the purpose of falsifying research that would "disprove" any links between vaccines and toxic side effects."

Why Does the CDC Not Invalidate Dr. Thorsen's Research?

Dr. Thorsen's studies are frequently quoted in rebuttals to the claim that vaccines may play a role in the disorder. The studies in question were riddled with flaws, yet despite the fact that Thorsen's studies may actually be a complete sham, the CDC has not officially declared them invalid. In fact, they're still listed on the CDC website as part of the scientific backing of their stance on autism and vaccine safety.

Nor has the media jumped on this story and exposed how vaccine-safety claims have been based on junk science by a scam artist. They've also failed to question why none of the journals have denounced Dr. Thorsen's studies, which support the claim that vaccines are safe, while Dr. Wakefield's research was denounced after the mere insinuation of wrong-doing.

Furthermore, according to research by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill writing for AgeOfAutism.com, Dr. Thorsen has also been working with the American Psychiatric Association (APA) on an updated definition of "autism" for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which is slated for release in May 2013. I believe it would be prudent to take a deeper look at his input, to make sure his connections to the CDC and his role in protecting vaccine safety has not tainted the new definition of autism.

The sad fact is that conflicts of interest color most of the ties between our government and the pharmaceutical industry, and conventional media repeatedly fails to report the truth on these matters.

So, who can you trust?

I would recommend trusting yourself. Do your own research, and make your own decisions accordingly. The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) is an excellent resource on all things relating to the controversial topic of vaccines. They have been compiling objective evidence showing both sides of the issue and have been one of the strongest voices for vaccine safety and true informed consent.

Source:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/10/28/cdc-director-arrested-for-child-molestation--bestiality.aspx?e_cid=20111028_DNL_art_1
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2011-10-18T21:20:00.003-04:00

Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD

By Adrian Chen
Gawker Media
Oct 15, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters' moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group's internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group's plans to authorities and corporations targeted by protesters.

Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he's done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads "a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world." But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers' social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.

As part of their intelligence-gathering operation, the group gained access to a listserv used by Occupy Wall Street organizers called 'September17discuss'. On 'September17discuss', organizers hash out tactics and plan events, conduct post-mortems of media appearances, and trade the latest protest gossip. On Friday, Ryan leaked thousands of 'September17discuss' emails to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who is now using them to try to smear Occupy Wall Street as an anarchist conspiracy to disrupt global markets.

What may much more alarming to Occupy Wall Street organizers is that while Ryan was monitoring 'September17discuss', he was forwarding interesting email threads to contacts at the NYPD and FBI, including special agent Jordan T. Loyd, a member of the FBI's New York-based cyber security team.

On September 18th, the day after the protest's start, Ryan forwarded an email exchange between Occupy Wall Street organizers to Loyd. The email exchange is harmless: Organizers discuss how they need to increase union participation in the protest. "We need more outreach to workers. The best way to do that is by showing solidarity with them," writes organizer Jackie DiSalvo in the thread. She then lists a group of potential unions to work with.

Another organizer named Conor responds: "+1,000,000 to Jackie's proposal on working people/union struggles outreach and solidarity. Also, why not invite people to protest Troy Davis's execution date at Liberty Plaza this Monday?"

Five minutes after Conor sent his email, Ryan forwarded the thread—with no additional comment—to Loyd's FBI email address. "Thanks!" Loyd responded. He cc'd his colleague named Ilhwan Yum, a fellow cybersecurity expert at the agency, on the reply.

On September 26th, Ryan forwarded another email thread to Agent Loyd. But this time he clued in the NYPD as well, sending the email to Dennis Dragos, a detective with the NYPD Computer Crimes Squad.

The NYPD might have been very grateful he did so, since it involved a proposed demonstration outside NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. In the thread, organizers debated whether to crash an upcoming press conference planned by marijuana advocates to celebrate NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly ordering officers to halt arrests over possession of small amounts of marijuana.

"Should we bring some folks from Liberty Plaza to chant "SHAME" for the NYPD's recent brutalities on Thursday night for the Troy Davis and Saturday for the Occupy Wall Street march?" asked one person in the email thread. (That past Saturday, the video of NYPD officer Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying a protester had gone viral.) Ryan promptly forwarded the email thread to Loyd at the FBI and Dragos at the NYPD.

Interestingly, it was Ryan who revealed himself as a snitch. We learned of these emails from the archive Ryan leaked yesterday in the hopes of undermining the Occupy Wall Street movement. In assembling the archive of 'September17discuss' emails, it appears he accidentally included some of his own forwarded emails indicating he was ratting out organizers.

"I don't know, I just put everything I had into one big package," Ryan said when asked how the emails ended up in the file posted to Andrew Breitbart's blog. Some security expert.

But Ryan didn't just tip off the authorities. He was also giving information to companies as well. When protesters discussed demonstrating in front of morning shows like Today and Good Morning America, Ryan quickly forwarded the thread to Mark Farrell, the chief security officer at Comcast, the parent company of NBC Universal.

Ryan wrote:

Since you are the CSO, I am not sure of your role in NBC since COMCAST owns them.
There is a huge protest in New York call "Occupy Wall Street". Here is an email of stunts that they will try to pull on the TODAY show.
We have been heavily monitoring Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous.

"Thanks Tom," Farrell responded. "I'll pass this to my counterpart at NBCU."

Did the FBI and/or NYPD ask him to monitor Occupy Wall Street? Was he just forwarding the emails on out of the goodness of his heart? In a phone interview with us, Ryan denied being an informant. "I do not work with the FBI," he said.

Ryan said he knows Loyd through their mutual involvement in the Open Web Application Security Project, a non-profit computer security group of which Ryan is a board member. Ryan said he sent the emails to Loyd unsolicited simply because "everyone's curious" about Occupy Wall Street, and he had a ground-eye view. "Jordan never asked me for anything."

Was he sending every email he got to the authorities? Ryan said he couldn't remember how many he'd passed on to the FBI or NYPD, or other third parties. Later he said that he only forwarded the two emails we noticed, detailed above.

But even if he'd been sending them on regularly, they were probably of limited use to the authorities. Most of the real organizing at Occupy Wall Street happens face-to-face, according to David Graeber, who was one of the earliest organizers. "We did some practical work on [the email list] at first—I think that's where I first proposed the "we are the 99%" motto—but mainly it's just an expressive forum," he wrote in an email. "No one would seriously discuss a plan to do something covert or dangerous on such a list."

But regardless of how many emails Ryan sent—or whether Loyd ever asked Ryan to spy on Occupy Wall Street—Loyd was almost certainly interested in the emails he received. Loyd has helped hunt down members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, and he and his colleagues in the FBI's cyber security squad have been monitoring their involvement in Occupy Wall Street.

At a New York cyber security conference one day before the protest began, Loyd cited Occupy Wall Street as an example of a "newly emerging threat to U.S. information systems." (In the lead-up to Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous had issued threats against the New York Stock Exchange.) He told the assembled crowd the FBI has been "monitoring the event on cyberspace and are preparing to meet it with physical security," according to a New York Institute of Technology press release.

We contacted Loyd to ask about his relationship with Ryan and if any of the information Ryan passed along was of any use to the agency. He declined to answer questions and referred us to the FBI's press office. We'll post an update if we hear back from them.

We asked Ryan again this morning about how closely he was working with the authorities. Again, he claimed it was only these two emails, which is unlikely given he forwarded them to the FBI and NYPD without providing any context or explaining where he'd gotten them.

And he detailed his rationale for assisting the NYPD:

My respect for FDNY & NYPD stems from them risking their lives to save mine when my house was on fire in sunset park when I was 8 yrs old. Also, for them risking their lives and saving many family and friends during 9/11.
Don't you find it Ironic that out of all the NYPD involved with the protest, [protesters] have only targeted the ones with Black Ribbons, given to them for their bravery during 9/11?]

I am sorry if we see things differently, I try to look at everything as a whole and in patterns. Everything we do in life and happens in life, there is a pattern behind it.

Source:
http://m.gawker.com/5850054/meet-the-guy-who-snitched-on-occupy-wall-street-to-the-fbi-and-nypd?tag=exclusive
______________________

2011-10-16T20:23:00.000-04:00

Facebook accused of violating US wiretap law
'Like' cookies tracked users, even when logged out

By Dan Goodin
The Register
Oct 14, 2011

A Mississippi woman has accused Facebook of violating federal wiretap statutes by tracking her internet browsing history even when she wasn't logged onto the social networking site.

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in federal court in the northern district of Mississippi, Brooke Rutledge of Lafayette County, Mississippi, also asserted claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespassing, and invasion of privacy
The complaint, which seeks class-action status so other users can join, comes three weeks after Australian blogger Nik Cubrilovic published evidence that Facebook “Like” buttons scattered across the web allowed Facebook to track users' browsing habits even when they were signed out of their accounts.

“Leading up to September 23, 2011, Facebook tracked, collected, and stored its users' wire or electronic communications, including but not limited to portions of their internet browsing history even when the users were not logged-in to Facebook,” the 17-page complaint stated. “Plaintiff did not give consent or otherwise authorize Facebook to intercept, track, collect, and store her wire or electronic communications, including but not limited to her internet browsing history when not logged-in to Facebook.”

The complaint claims the behavior violated provisions of Facebook's own privacy policy that state: “If you're logged out or don't have a Facebook account and visit a website with the Like button or another social plugin, your browser sends us a more limited set of information. For example, because you're not logged in to Facebook, we don't receive your User ID.”

But according to Cubrilovic Facebook cookies containing unique identifiers remain on a user's hard drive and are sent back to the social network each time he visits a third-party site containing a Facebook Like icon.

“Even when you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit,” Cubrilovic wrote.

Facebook has since said that many of the cookies Cubrilovic referred to are intended to foil spam and phishing attacks and that not all of the data sent back to the social networking site is logged.

Wednesday's complaint is the latest to seek redress for alleged privacy violations that result from cookies and other files that websites use to track the browsing habits of their visitors.

In the past 18 months, Disney, Microsoft, McDonalds, and others have all been sued, often for using technologies that respawn tracking cookies even after users have deleted them. Many of them have been tossed out of court because plaintiffs couldn't quantify monetary damages that resulted from the practice.

Facebook representatives didn't respond to an email seeking comment for this post.

Source:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/14/facebook_tracking_lawsuit/
___________________

2011-10-12T21:07:00.000-04:00

Ron Paul wins another straw poll

Rep. Paul placed first, but Family Research Council President Tony Perkins quickly dismissed the results of his own survey, instead insisting that pizzaman Herman Cain was the real winner.

Russian Times
Oct. 11, 2011

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul came in on top again at a straw poll over the weekend, but as usual the congressman from Texas is creating a bit of commotion with his continuing success.

Rep. Paul placed first during the Values Voter Summit’s straw poll in Washington this weekend, but Family Research Council President Tony Perkins quickly dismissed the results of his own survey, instead insisting that pizzaman Herman Cain was the real winner.

“I think there’s something to be said about his results in the straw poll,” Perkins said of Cain to CNN on Monday.

Perkins was quick to denounce Paul’s success. To CNN’s American Morning on Monday today, Perkins said, “I don’t think Ron Paul is truly reflective of where values voters stand.”

Though Perkins has no problem voicing his own favorite, the voters in Washington opted for Paul as the winner, which was seen in the real results.

Of the 1,983 ballots case, Paul took 732, or 37 percent of the total.

Cain came in second with 23 percent of the votes, followed by former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.

Previously Paul had won straw polls in California and South Carolina, as well as a straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference much earlier in 2011.

His continuing success as he garners supporters has created just as much controversy, however. Following his performance at a recent televised GOP debate, online voters at the website for Fox News suggested that Paul was the winner of the event. Within hours, however, Fox struck the results off the website.

Paul had previously acknowledged his own success, telling the debate crowd that he was hesitant to discuss his choice for a running mate until he placed consistently in the top two. He was quick to remind the audience, however, that he has been polling strong seemingly everywhere since he announced his candidacy.

One place voters have been continuing to show opposition for sure is with the campaign for Rep. Michele Bachmann, which seems to be running out of steam. Despite starting off strong, the representative from Minnesota came in fifth at the Values Voter Summit contest.

Source:
http://rt.com/usa/news/ron-paul-straw-poll-513/
__________________

2011-10-11T22:51:00.000-04:00

Panic of the Plutocrats

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
October 9, 2011

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is.

They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs.

They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/opinion/panic-of-the-plutocrats.html
_________________

2011-10-10T07:23:00.001-04:00

CNN's Factcheck Failure on Occupy Wall Street

FAIR.org
10/4/11

Former CNBC reporter Erin Burnett's CNN show OutFront debuted Monday night (10/3/11) with a failed attempt to factcheck the Occupy Wall Street protests.

The show kicked off with Burnett explaining that she went to Wall Street today to see those protests for myself. I saw dancing, bongo drums, even a clown.... I asked several protesters what it was that they wanted. Now, they did not know.... They did know what they don't want.

Burnett added that "it seems like people want a messiah leader, just like they did when they anointed Barack Obama."

That segued into an interview with center-right CNN pundit John Avlon, a former speechwriter for Republican Rudolph Giuliani. Avlon dismissed the protests ("It's tough to get your demands taken seriously dressed when you're dressed as a zombie"), adding that "conservative populism has always played a major role in American politics. Liberal populist marches like this tend to alienate more people than they attract."

After that discussion, Burnett attempted to set the protesters straight on the facts. As she put it: "What are they protesting? Nobody seems to know. So, this afternoon, we went to Wall Street to find out."

Burnett quizzed one protester: "So do you know that taxpayers actually made money on the Wall Street bailout?" When he says that he was unaware of this, Burnett insists it is true-- and goes on to argue that it basically negates the whole point of the protest:

That's all it would take to put an end to the unrest?

Well, as promised, we did go double-check the numbers on the bank bailout, and this is what we found. Yes, the bank bailouts made money for American taxpayers, right now to the tune of $10 billion, anticipated that it will be $20 billion. Those are seriously the numbers. This was the big issue, so we solved it.

The TARP program is not, in fact, the "big issue" of the Occupy Wall Street movement; the concerns about inequality and lack of democracy go far deeper than that. When the Wall Street bailouts are discussed by protesters, the point they seem to be making about it is that banks benefited from generous bailouts that the vast majority of Americans would never enjoy. (As one popular chant puts it: "Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!")

And the fact that the loans were repaid does not mean that they were not a subsidy to the banking industry. How much would it have cost the banks to get the money they needed to survive from private sources? The difference between those terms and what the government actually charged was a gift to the bankers--one that will never be paid back.

The assumption that society as a whole benefited from helping out the banks is debatable, though you rarely if ever see it debated in corporate media (Extra!, 10/10). As economist Dean Baker wrote (9/20/10):

We are also supposed to feel good that the vast majority of the TARP money was repaid. This is another effort to prey on the public's ignorance. Had it not been for the bailout, most of the major center banks would have been wiped out. This would have destroyed the fortunes of their shareholders, many of their creditors, and their top executives. This would have been a massive redistribution to the rest of society--their loss is our gain.

And the Wall Street bailouts are about far more than TARP. As Bloomberg News recently reported (8/22/11), Federal Reserve lending programs to the banking industry topped $1.2 trillion.

These government policies went a long way towards protecting the interests of Wall Street giants. Working people got very little, and the unemployment and foreclosure crises continue to wreak considerable damage on the economy. This is why people are protesting.

The economists and analysts who have criticized these policies could explain this to Erin Burnett's audience. MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell, for instance, interviewed Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz last night (10/3/11) after he made an appearance at the protests.

Burnett used to work for the same financial companies that profited from the bailouts--Goldman Sachs, Citigroup--and she is engaged to be married to a Citigroup executive (Business Insider, 9/30/11). Burnett's journalistic career includes plenty of attempts to promote Wall Street interests, earning her praise from the likes of Rush Limbaugh (FAIR Blog, 10/3/11). She even tried to defend Wall Street giants from criticism over using TARP funds to pay giant bonuses (FAIR Blog, 2/3/09).

If CNN is interested in factchecking claims about Wall Street, they might want to start by taking a look at those made by their new host. At the very least, the show should invite the economists and policy experts who could set the record straight.

ACTION:
Please tell CNN's OutFront that Erin Burnett's factcheck of Occupy Wall Street needs factchecking.

CONTACT:
CNN OutFront
Comment Form:
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/show/?s=erinburnettoutfront&hdln=2

You can also send your comments to the show on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/OutFrontCNN

Source:
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4408

_____________________

2011-10-08T09:00:00.001-04:00

NY State Senators Say We've Got Too Much Free Speech; Introduce Bill To Fix That

"A group of four NY state senators have written a paper suggesting that free speech should be looked upon as a government granted privilege rather than a right."

Tech Dirt
from the i-find-this-offensive dept
Oct.1, 2011

We've been pointing out a variety of attempts to push back on the First Amendment lately. One fertile ground for such attacks are local politicians carrying the "cyberbullying" banner, in various attempts to magically outlaw being a "jerk" online, usually by making it illegal to offend someone online. Of course, making someone's action illegal based on how someone else feels about it is all kinds of crazy. It also would seem to violate the very principles of the First Amendment, which bar Congress (and local governments) from passing any laws that take away one's right to free speech.

In the past, lawmakers pushing these laws have tended to simply ignore the First Amendment issue, and focus on screaming "protect the children!" as loudly as possible (never mind the fact that kids seem much less concerned about "bullying" than all these adults seem to think). However, it appears that some state Senators in NY are trying a new line of attack: going directly after the First Amendment and suggesting that current interpretations are way too broad, and it's not really meant to protect any sort of free speech right. In fact, it sounds as though they're trying to redefine the right to free speech into a privilege that can be taken away. Seriously:

Proponents of a more refined First Amendment argue that this freedom should be treated not as a right but as a privilege — a special entitlement granted by the state on a conditional basis that can be revoked if it is ever abused or maltreated.

Yes, that totally flips the First Amendment on its head. It is not a "more refined First Amendment." It's the anti-First Amendment. It suggests, by its very nature, that the government possesses the right to grant the "privilege" of free speech to citizens... and thus the right to revoke it. That's an astonishingly dangerous path, and one that should not be taken seriously. Of course, given their right to speak freely, state senators Jeff Klein, Diane Savino, David Carlucci and David Valesky have every right to put forth that argument -- but similarly, it allows others to point out their rather scary beliefs.

If you'd like to see the full report (pdf), I warn you that it is almost entirely written IN ALL CAPS (for no clear reason, there are a few chunks that revert to normal capitalization -- including a big chunk in the middle, that starts mid-section). I have no idea why so much of the paper is in ALL CAPS, but I'm kind of offended by it. Can we please remove their "privilege" to put out such things until they've learned to not maltreat capital letters?

The paper attempts to list out various examples of types of cyberstalking and cyberbullying -- some of which seem pretty ridiculous:

LEAVING IMPROPER MESSAGES ON ONLINE MESSAGE BOARDS OR SENDING HURTFUL AND DAMAGING MESSAGES TO OTHERS;

"Improper"? Seem a little broad to you? Does that mean the next person who comments here about something off-topic is a cyberbully?

“FLAMING” (HURTFUL, CRUEL, AND OFTENTIMES INTIMIDATING MESSAGES INTENDED TO INFLAME, INSIGHT, OR ENRAGE);

Whoo boy. An awful lot of you in the comments better watch out...

“HAPPY SLAPPING” (RECORDING PHYSICAL ASSAULTS ON MOBILE PHONES OR DIGITAL CAMERAS, THEN DISTRIBUTING THEM TO OTHERS);

Holy crap. 2005 wants its silly "crazy children" meme back. Yes, there were a few instances of this extremely brief "fad" that came and went in like a month half a decade ago. Then the next internet meme came along.

"TROLLING” (DELIBERATELY AND DECEITFULLY POSTING INFORMATION TO ENTICE GENUINELY HELPFUL PEOPLE TO RESPOND (OFTEN EMOTIONALLY), OFTEN DONE TO PROVOKE OTHERS);

Ooh, once again. Commenters beware.

EXCLUSION (INTENTIONALLY AND CRUELLY EXCLUDING SOMEONE FROM AN ONLINE GROUP).

Seriously? If we don't let you into the club, it's now a form of cyberbullying? It makes you wonder what happened to these particular Senators when they were kids.

The paper also attacks "anonymity," again ignoring how anonymity can often be extremely helpful to kids who wish to discuss things and ask questions without revealing who they are.

As for where they're going with this? Well, you guessed it: they're planning to introduce new laws to deal with cyberbullying (even though NY already has such a law). The plan is to extend two existing areas of law: "stalking in the third degree" will now include cyberbullying, and "manslaughter in the second degree" will be expanded to "include the emerging problem of bullycide."

This is basically a "Lori Drew" law. And it's ridiculous. If I say something to someone and they then go commit suicide, should I be guilty of manslaughter? Do the folks behind this not realize that this doesn't help prevent suicides, but it encourages them in giving people who are upset by something someone said extra incentive to kill themselves to "get back" at the person who was mean to them.

The cyberstalking part is no less ridiculous. It's ridiculously broad. It does not require that the person accused of cyberstalking initiate the activity, it does not require intent to harm or frighten, and a single message can be a cause of action. Think about that for a second. Someone could send you a message, you could do a single reply with no ill will or bad intent... and be guilty of the crime of cyberstalking. Damn. Do the folks writing this bill not realize how widely this will be abused?

Hopefully no one is so offended in reading such a dangerous proposal that they go out and commit suicide. At least be comforted in knowing that it won't allow for the authors to be accused of manslaughter until after the bill passes.

Source:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111001/00002316160/ny-state-senators-say-weve-got-too-much-free-speech-introduce-bill-to-fix-that.shtml
_____________________

2011-09-22T17:59:00.000-04:00

OFFICIAL ANONYMOUS PRESS RELEASE FOR OCCUPY WALL STREET ACTION

Greetings Wall Street,
We are Anonymous.

The fetid empire of corruption and consumption that you have created is stifling the lives of hard working Americans. You have crystallized this country into a monolithic tyranny, yet in doing so made the ties that bind its people brittle.

Some four years ago you shattered this country, liquidating it piecemeal for your own selfish interests. We are here, gathered at the steps of your butcher block four years later, frenzied and furious. We are Democrats and Republicans, young and old. Your horrendous actions have crossed party lines. Your crimes have united this great melting pot into a white hot alloy of rage.

The world is stirring and with it, revolution is brewing. Perhaps you see yourselves at the eye of the storm, luxuriating in peace and tranquility while all around is ripped apart and made anew.

    Anonymous is here to offer a gentle reminder:

    You are not at the eye of the storm;
    You are at the center of the crosshairs!

The seige of Wall Street will continue until such a time that the decision to consider corporations persons under the law for the purposes of first amendment free speech is revoked through legislative or judicial decision.

Entities that oppress the people while corrupting the public domain and due process are not persons. Corporations must cease to be considered persons under the law. Their sociopathic actions towards the public, the environment and each other have shown them time and time again to be unworthy of being awarded the distinction of personhood.

The people have grown weary of their corporate shackles, the greed of Wall Street having left them with nothing to lose, but their chains. From Cairo to Iran, London to Tunisia and Syria to Greece, this is our day of rage.

We are Anonymous.
We are legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget

Wall Street,
Expect us.

Source:
http://pastebin.com/7q2j8HCV
_______________

2011-09-22T17:13:00.007-04:00

Communique From Anonymous
USA Day Of Vengence

Wednesday - September 21, 2011

On September 17, 2011 approximately 15,000 peaceful demonstrators in dozens of cities around the USA gathered, marched - and occupied public space to protest the unjust policies of the US government and the corruption in our financial institutions. The central protest site was in the financial district of New York City, where peaceful protesters faced phalanxes of heavily armed paramilitary police officers from local and federal jurisdictions.

The arrests began almost immediately, many for violating the 1845 so called "mask" laws.

Later that day, and according to plan - many of these protests ended with a peaceful occupation of public space. Again, the central occupation occurred in NYC. More arrests continued to take place. All of this was expected, it is part of progressive activism. Anonymous was content to challenge these stupid "mask" laws in court.

Not only is the Guy Fawlkes mask covered under freedom expression as a symbol of our movement, but we believe that everyone has a right to protest anonymously using bandanas, masks - etc.

But then on Tuesday - September 20, 2011 everything changed in a flash of police instigated violence. As rain began to fall on the NYC encampment, heavily armed police moved in; Removing tarps used to cover media equipment, arresting independent journalists, confiscating media equipment - and using excessive force against and arresting innocent peaceful protesters, several of whom were abused and injured.

http://youtu.be/dyvbI6Eq-qA

This year, we heard President Barack Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton say over and over in country after country from the Balkans through the mid-east to Africa that the right to peacefully protest and occupy public space is a right that MUST be respected in every instance. And they are correct, and this also applies to the USA.

In fact, even more so. In the USA of all countries in the world, the police should have been deployed to PROTECT the protesters - not a giant brass bull that is the ultimate symbol of greed and corruption in America. And yet we were treated to the grotesque picture of dozens of armored police surrounding this brass bull, while thousands more police were deployed solely to harass, arrest - and abuse peaceful protesters.

http://bit.ly/qdvYAj

Anonymous & the other cyber liberation groups around the world together with all the freedom loving people in the USA will NOT stand for this. We will peacefully yet forcefully resist the abuses of the NYC Police Department.

And so Anonymous announces a nationwide "Day Of Vengence" to take place in dozens of cities across the USA on Saturday - September 24, 2011 at High Noon.

Videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzVAw9DvMVA
http://youtu.be/2svRa-VSaOU
http://www.livestream.com/newchannel/popoutplayer?channel=globalrevolution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M186KXT3jE&feature=youtu.be

Account of Yahoo's censorship on Wallstreet protests

http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/09/20/323856/yahoo-censoring-occupy-wall-street-protests

Media Coverage
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/44600272#44600241
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/occupy-wall-street-protesters-are-sti
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/19/us-wall-street-protests-idUSTRE78I51D20110919
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/20/occupy-wall-street-enters_n_972267.html

In coordination with these protests across the USA on September 24th, Anonymous and other cyber liberation groups will launch a series of cyber attacks against various targets including Wall Street, Corrupt Banking Institutions - and the NYC Police Department.

We encourage the media to follow the Twitter feed @PLF2012 for ongoing reports throughout the day.

We Are Anonymous - We Are Everywhere - We Are Legion - We Never Forget - We Never Forgive

EXPECT US -- Anonymous

Source:
http://pastebin.com/VVD4PMFf
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2011-09-19T17:54:00.001-04:00

A Tahrir Moment on Wall Street

Adbusters.org
Sept. 18, 2011

On Saturday, September 17th, many of us watched in awe as five thousand Americans descended onto the financial district of lower Manhattan, waved signs, unfurled banners, beat drums, chanted slogans and proceeded to walk towards the "financial Gomorrah" of the nation. They vowed to "occupy Wall Street" and to "bring justice to the bankers," but the New York police thwarted their efforts temporarily, locking down the symbolic street with barricades and checkpoints. Undeterred, protestors walked laps around the area before holding a people's assembly and setting up a semi-permanent protest encampment in a park on Liberty Street, a stone's throw from Wall Street and a block from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Three hundred spent the night, several hundred reinforcements arrived the next day and as we write this article, the encampment is rolling out sleeping bags once again. When they tweeted to the world that they were hungry, a nearby pizzeria received $2,800 in orders for delivery in a single hour. Emboldened by an outpouring of international solidarity, these American indignados say they'll be there to greet the bankers when the stock market opens on Monday. It looks like, for now, the police don't think they can stop them. ABC News reports that "even though the demonstrators don’t have a permit for the protest, [the New York Police Department says that] they have no plans to remove those protesters who seem determined to stay on the streets." Organizers on the ground say, "We're digging in for a long-term occupation." Now the world is watching and wondering, could this be the spark of a "Tahrir Moment" in the USA?

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET was inspired by the people's assemblies of Spain and floated as a concept by a double-page poster in the 97th issue of Adbusters magazine, but it was spearheaded, orchestrated and accomplished by independent activists. It all started when Adbusters asked its network of culture jammers to flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. The idea caught on immediately on every social network and unaffiliated activists seized the meme and built an open-source organizing site. A few days later, a general assembly was held in New York City and a hundred and fifty people showed up. These activists became the core organizers of the occupation. The mystique of Anonymous pushed the meme into the mainstream media. Their video communique endorsing the action garnered 100,000 views and a warning from the Department of Homeland Security addressed to the nation's bankers. When, in August, the indignados of Spain sent word that they would be holding a solidarity event in Madrid's financial district, activists in Milan, Valencia, London, Lisbon, Athens, San Francisco, Madison, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Israel and beyond vowed to do the same.

There is a shared feeling on the streets around the world that the global economy is a Ponzi scheme run by and for Big Finance. People everywhere are waking up to the realization that there is something fundamentally wrong with a system in which speculative financial transactions add up, each day, to US$1.3 trillion (50 times more than the sum of all the commercial transactions). Meanwhile, according to a United Nations report, "in the 35 countries for which data exist, nearly 40 per cent of jobseekers have been without work for more than one year."

"CEOs, the biggest corporations and the wealthy are taking too much from our country and I think it's time for us to take back," says one activist who joined the protests last Saturday. Jason Ahmadi, who traveled in from Oakland, California explained that, "a lot of us feel there is a large crisis in our economy and a lot of it is caused by the folks who do business here." Bill Steyerd, a Vietnam veteran from Queens said, "it's a worthy cause because people on Wall Street are blood-sucking warmongers."

There is not just anger. There is also a sense that the standard solutions to the economic crisis proposed by our politicians and mainstream economists — stimulus, cuts, debt, low interest rates, encouraging consumption — are false options that will not work. Deeper changes are needed … like a "Robin Hood" tax on financial transactions; reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act in the USA; implementing a ban on high frequency "flash" trading. The "too big to fail" banks must be be broken up, downsized and made to serve the people, the economy and society again. The financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 meltdown must be brought to justice and given lengthy prison terms. Then there is the long-term mother of all solutions: a total rethinking of Western consumerism that throws into question how we measure progress.

If the current economic woes in Europe and the US spiral into a prolonged global recession, then people's encampments will become a permanent fixtures at financial districts and outside stock markets around the world. Until our demands are met and the global economic regime is fundamentally reformed, our tent cities will keep popping up everywhere.

Bravo to those courageous souls in the encampment on New York's Liberty Street. Every night that #OCCUPYWALLSTREET continues will escalate the possibility of a full-fledged global uprising against business as usual.

Posted by Micah White and Kalle Lasn

Source:

http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/tahrir-moment-wall-street.html

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2011-09-16T19:00:00.002-04:00

The Shame of College Sports

A litany of scandals in recent years have made the corruption of college sports constant front-page news. We profess outrage each time we learn that yet another student-athlete has been taking money under the table. But the real scandal is the very structure of college sports, wherein student-athletes generate billions of dollars for universities and private companies while earning nothing for themselves. Here, a leading civil-rights historian makes the case for paying college athletes—and reveals how a spate of lawsuits working their way through the courts could destroy the NCAA.

by Taylor Branch
The Atlantic
October Issue
Posted Sept 13, 2011

“I'm not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.”

Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers—among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors.

The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.

“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”

Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

William Friday, a former president of North Carolina’s university system, still winces at the memory. “Boy, the silence that fell in that room,” he recalled recently. “I never will forget it.” Friday, who founded and co-chaired two of the three Knight Foundation sports initiatives over the past 20 years, called Vaccaro “the worst of all” the witnesses ever to come before the panel.

But what Vaccaro said in 2001 was true then, and it’s true now: corporations offer money so they can profit from the glory of college athletes, and the universities grab it. In 2010, despite the faltering economy, a single college athletic league, the football-crazed Southeastern Conference (SEC), became the first to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts.

The Big Ten pursued closely at $905 million. That money comes from a combination of ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise, licensing fees, and other sources—but the great bulk of it comes from television contracts.

Educators are in thrall to their athletic departments because of these television riches and because they respect the political furies that can burst from a locker room. “There’s fear,” Friday told me when I visited him on the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill last fall. As we spoke, two giant construction cranes towered nearby over the university’s Kenan Stadium, working on the latest $77 million renovation. (The University of Michigan spent almost four times that much to expand its Big House.) Friday insisted that for the networks, paying huge sums to universities was a bargain. “We do every little thing for them,” he said. “We furnish the theater, the actors, the lights, the music, and the audience for a drama measured neatly in time slots.

They bring the camera and turn it on.” Friday, a weathered idealist at 91, laments the control universities have ceded in pursuit of this money. If television wants to broadcast football from here on a Thursday night, he said, “we shut down the university at 3 o’clock to accommodate the crowds.” He longed for a campus identity more centered in an academic mission.

The United States is the only country in the world that hosts big-time sports at institutions of higher learning.

This should not, in and of itself, be controversial. College athletics are rooted in the classical ideal of Mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a sound body—and who would argue with that? College sports are deeply inscribed in the culture of our nation. Half a million young men and women play competitive intercollegiate sports each year. Millions of spectators flock into football stadiums each Saturday in the fall, and tens of millions more watch on television.

The March Madness basketball tournament each spring has become a major national event, with upwards of 80 million watching it on television and talking about the games around the office water cooler. ESPN has spawned ESPNU, a channel dedicated to college sports, and Fox Sports and other cable outlets are developing channels exclusively to cover sports from specific regions or divisions.

With so many people paying for tickets and watching on television, college sports has become Very Big Business. According to various reports, the football teams at Texas, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, and Penn State—to name just a few big-revenue football schools—each earn between $40 million and $80 million in profits a year, even after paying coaches multimillion-dollar salaries. When you combine so much money with such high, almost tribal, stakes—football boosters are famously rabid in their zeal to have their alma mater win—corruption is likely to follow.

Scandal after scandal has rocked college sports. In 2010, the NCAA sanctioned the University of Southern California after determining that star running back Reggie Bush and his family had received “improper benefits” while he played for the Trojans. (Among other charges, Bush and members of his family were alleged to have received free airfare and limousine rides, a car, and a rent-free home in San Diego, from sports agents who wanted Bush as a client.)

The Bowl Championship Series stripped USC of its 2004 national title, and Bush returned the Heisman Trophy he had won in 2005. Last fall, as Auburn University football stormed its way to an undefeated season and a national championship, the team’s star quarterback, Cam Newton, was dogged by allegations that his father had used a recruiter to solicit up to $180,000 from Mississippi State in exchange for his son’s matriculation there after junior college in 2010.

Jim Tressel, the highly successful head football coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes, resigned last spring after the NCAA alleged he had feigned ignorance of rules violations by players on his team. At least 28 players over the course of the previous nine seasons, according to Sports Illustrated, had traded autographs, jerseys, and other team memorabilia in exchange for tattoos or cash at a tattoo parlor in Columbus, in violation of NCAA rules.

Late this summer, Yahoo Sports reported that the NCAA was investigating allegations that a University of Miami booster had given millions of dollars in illicit cash and services to more than 70 Hurricanes football players over eight years.

The list of scandals goes on. With each revelation, there is much wringing of hands. Critics scold schools for breaking faith with their educational mission, and for failing to enforce the sanctity of “amateurism.”

Sportswriters denounce the NCAA for both tyranny and impotence in its quest to “clean up” college sports. Observers on all sides express jumbled emotions about youth and innocence, venting against professional mores or greedy amateurs.

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

Don Curtis, a UNC trustee, told me that impoverished football players cannot afford movie tickets or bus fare home. Curtis is a rarity among those in higher education today, in that he dares to violate the signal taboo: “I think we should pay these guys something.”

Fans and educators alike recoil from this proposal as though from original sin. Amateurism is the whole point, they say. Paid athletes would destroy the integrity and appeal of college sports. Many former college athletes object that money would have spoiled the sanctity of the bond they enjoyed with their teammates. I, too, once shuddered instinctively at the notion of paid college athletes.

But after an inquiry that took me into locker rooms and ivory towers across the country, I have come to believe that sentiment blinds us to what’s before our eyes. Big-time college sports are fully commercialized. Billions of dollars flow through them each year. The NCAA makes money, and enables universities and corporations to make money, from the unpaid labor of young athletes.

Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation.

Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. The NCAA, in its zealous defense of bogus principles, sometimes destroys the dreams of innocent young athletes.

The NCAA today is in many ways a classic cartel. Efforts to reform it—most notably by the three Knight Commissions over the course of 20 years—have, while making changes around the edges, been largely fruitless. The time has come for a major overhaul. And whether the powers that be like it or not, big changes are coming. Threats loom on multiple fronts: in Congress, the courts, breakaway athletic conferences, student rebellion, and public disgust. Swaddled in gauzy clichés, the NCAA presides over a vast, teetering glory.

Founding Myths

From the start, amateurism in college sports has been honored more often in principle than in fact; the NCAA was built of a mixture of noble and venal impulses. In the late 19th century, intellectuals believed that the sporting arena simulated an impending age of Darwinian struggle. Because the United States did not hold a global empire like England’s, leaders warned of national softness once railroads conquered the last continental frontier. As though heeding this warning, ingenious students turned variations on rugby into a toughening agent.

Today a plaque in New Brunswick, New Jersey, commemorates the first college game, on November 6, 1869, when Rutgers beat Princeton 6–4.

Walter Camp graduated from Yale in 1880 so intoxicated by the sport that he devoted his life to it without pay, becoming “the father of American football.” He persuaded other schools to reduce the chaos on the field by trimming each side from 15 players to 11, and it was his idea to paint measuring lines on the field. He conceived functional designations for players, coining terms such as quarterback. His game remained violent by design. Crawlers could push the ball forward beneath piles of flying elbows without pause until they cried “Down!” in submission.

In an 1892 game against its archrival, Yale, the Harvard football team was the first to deploy a “flying wedge,” based on Napoleon’s surprise concentrations of military force. In an editorial calling for the abolition of the play, The New York Times described it as “half a ton of bone and muscle coming into collision with a man weighing 160 or 170 pounds,” noting that surgeons often had to be called onto the field. Three years later, the continuing mayhem prompted the Harvard faculty to take the first of two votes to abolish football.

Charles Eliot, the university’s president, brought up other concerns. “Deaths and injuries are not the strongest argument against football,” declared Eliot. “That cheating and brutality are profitable is the main evil.” Still, Harvard football persisted. In 1903, fervent alumni built Harvard Stadium with zero college funds. The team’s first paid head coach, Bill Reid, started in 1905 at nearly twice the average salary for a full professor.
A newspaper story from that year, illustrated with the Grim Reaper laughing on a goalpost, counted 25 college players killed during football season.

A fairy-tale version of the founding of the NCAA holds that President Theodore Roosevelt, upset by a photograph of a bloodied Swarthmore College player, vowed to civilize or destroy football. The real story is that Roosevelt maneuvered shrewdly to preserve the sport—and give a boost to his beloved Harvard.

After McClure’s magazine published a story on corrupt teams with phantom students, a muckraker exposed Walter Camp’s $100,000 slush fund at Yale. In response to mounting outrage, Roosevelt summoned leaders from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to the White House, where Camp parried mounting criticism and conceded nothing irresponsible in the college football rules he’d established.

At Roosevelt’s behest, the three schools issued a public statement that college sports must reform to survive, and representatives from 68 colleges founded a new organization that would soon be called the National Collegiate Athletic Association. A Haverford College official was confirmed as secretary but then promptly resigned in favor of Bill Reid, the new Harvard coach, who instituted new rules that benefited Harvard’s playing style at the expense of Yale’s. At a stroke, Roosevelt saved football and dethroned Yale.

For nearly 50 years, the NCAA, with no real authority and no staff to speak of, enshrined amateur ideals that it was helpless to enforce. (Not until 1939 did it gain the power even to mandate helmets.) In 1929, the Carnegie Foundation made headlines with a report, “American College Athletics,” which concluded that the scramble for players had “reached the proportions of nationwide commerce.”

Of the 112 schools surveyed, 81 flouted NCAA recommendations with inducements to students ranging from open payrolls and disguised booster funds to no-show jobs at movie studios. Fans ignored the uproar, and two-thirds of the colleges mentioned told The New York Times that they planned no changes. In 1939, freshman players at the University of Pittsburgh went on strike because they were getting paid less than their upperclassman teammates.

Embarrassed, the NCAA in 1948 enacted a “Sanity Code,” which was supposed to prohibit all concealed and indirect benefits for college athletes; any money for athletes was to be limited to transparent scholarships awarded solely on financial need. Schools that violated this code would be expelled from NCAA membership and thus exiled from competitive sports.

This bold effort flopped. Colleges balked at imposing such a drastic penalty on each other, and the Sanity Code was repealed within a few years. The University of Virginia went so far as to call a press conference to say that if its athletes were ever accused of being paid, they should be forgiven, because their studies at Thomas Jefferson’s university were so rigorous.

The Big Bluff

In 1951, the NCAA seized upon a serendipitous set of events to gain control of intercollegiate sports. First, the organization hired a young college dropout named Walter Byers as executive director. A journalist who was not yet 30 years old, he was an appropriately inauspicious choice for the vaguely defined new post. He wore cowboy boots and a toupee. He shunned personal contact, obsessed over details, and proved himself a bureaucratic master of pervasive, anonymous intimidation.

Although discharged from the Army during World War II for defective vision, Byers was able to see an opportunity in two contemporaneous scandals. In one, the tiny College of William and Mary, aspiring to challenge football powers Oklahoma and Ohio State, was found to be counterfeiting grades to keep conspicuously pampered players eligible.

In the other, a basketball point-shaving conspiracy (in which gamblers paid players to perform poorly) had spread from five New York colleges to the University of Kentucky, the reigning national champion, generating tabloid “perp” photos of gangsters and handcuffed basketball players. The scandals posed a crisis of credibility for collegiate athletics, and nothing in the NCAA’s feeble record would have led anyone to expect real reform.

But Byers managed to impanel a small infractions board to set penalties without waiting for a full convention of NCAA schools, which would have been inclined toward forgiveness. Then he lobbied a University of Kentucky dean—A. D. Kirwan, a former football coach and future university president—not to contest the NCAA’s dubious legal position (the association had no actual authority to penalize the university), pleading that college sports must do something to restore public support. His gambit succeeded when Kirwan reluctantly accepted a landmark precedent: the Kentucky basketball team would be suspended for the entire 1952–53 season. Its legendary coach, Adolph Rupp, fumed for a year in limbo.

The Kentucky case created an aura of centralized command for an NCAA office that barely existed. At the same time, a colossal misperception gave Byers leverage to mine gold. Amazingly in retrospect, most colleges and marketing experts considered the advent of television a dire threat to sports.

Studies found that broadcasts reduced live attendance, and therefore gate receipts, because some customers preferred to watch at home for free. Nobody could yet imagine the revenue bonanza that television represented. With clunky new TV sets proliferating, the 1951 NCAA convention voted 161–7 to outlaw televised games except for a specific few licensed by the NCAA staff.

All but two schools quickly complied. The University of Pennsylvania and Notre Dame protested the order to break contracts for home-game television broadcasts, claiming the right to make their own decisions. Byers objected that such exceptions would invite disaster.

The conflict escalated. Byers brandished penalties for games televised without approval. Penn contemplated seeking antitrust protection through the courts. Byers issued a contamination notice, informing any opponent scheduled to play Penn that it would be punished for showing up to compete. In effect, Byers mobilized the college world to isolate the two holdouts in what one sportswriter later called “the Big Bluff.”

Byers won. Penn folded in part because its president, the perennial White House contender Harold Stassen, wanted to mend relations with fellow schools in the emerging Ivy League, which would be formalized in 1954. When Notre Dame also surrendered, Byers conducted exclusive negotiations with the new television networks on behalf of every college team. Joe Rauh Jr., a prominent civil-rights attorney, helped him devise a rationing system to permit only 11 broadcasts a year—the fabled Game of the Week. Byers and Rauh selected a few teams for television exposure, excluding the rest.

On June 6, 1952, NBC signed a one-year deal to pay the NCAA $1.14 million for a carefully restricted football package. Byers routed all contractual proceeds through his office. He floated the idea that, to fund an NCAA infrastructure, his organization should take a 60 percent cut; he accepted 12 percent that season. (For later contracts, as the size of television revenues grew exponentially, he backed down to 5 percent.) Proceeds from the first NBC contract were enough to rent an NCAA headquarters, in Kansas City.

Only one year into his job, Byers had secured enough power and money to regulate all of college sports. Over the next decade, the NCAA’s power grew along with television revenues. Through the efforts of Byers’s deputy and chief lobbyist, Chuck Neinas, the NCAA won an important concession in the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, in which Congress made its granting of a precious antitrust exemption to the National Football League contingent upon the blackout of professional football on Saturdays.

Deftly, without even mentioning the NCAA, a rider on the bill carved each weekend into protected broadcast markets: Saturday for college, Sunday for the NFL. The NFL got its antitrust exemption. Byers, having negotiated the NCAA’s television package up to $3.1 million per football season—which was higher than the NFL’s figure in those early years—had made the NCAA into a spectacularly profitable cartel.

“We Eat What We Kill”

The NCAA’s control of college sports still rested on a fragile base, however: the consent of the colleges and universities it governed. For a time, the vast sums of television money delivered to these institutions through Byers’s deals made them willing to submit. But the big football powers grumbled about the portion of the television revenue diverted to nearly a thousand NCAA member schools that lacked major athletic programs.

They chafed against cost-cutting measures—such as restrictions on team size—designed to help smaller schools. “I don’t want Hofstra telling Texas how to play football,” Darrell Royal, the Longhorns coach, griped. By the 1970s and ’80s, as college football games delivered bonanza ratings—and advertising revenue—to the networks, some of the big football schools began to wonder: Why do we need to have our television coverage brokered through the NCAA? Couldn’t we get a bigger cut of that TV money by dealing directly with the networks?

Byers faced a rude internal revolt. The NCAA’s strongest legions, its big football schools, defected en masse. Calling the NCAA a price-fixing cartel that siphoned every television dollar through its coffers, in 1981 a rogue consortium of 61 major football schools threatened to sign an independent contract with NBC for $180 million over four years.

With a huge chunk of the NCAA’s treasury walking out the door, Byers threatened sanctions, as he had against Penn and Notre Dame three decades earlier. But this time the universities of Georgia and Oklahoma responded with an antitrust suit. “It is virtually impossible to overstate the degree of our resentment … of the NCAA,” said William Banowsky, the president of the University of Oklahoma. In the landmark 1984 NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the NCAA’s latest football contracts with television—and any future ones—as an illegal restraint of trade that harmed colleges and viewers. Overnight, the NCAA’s control of the television market for football vanished.

Upholding Banowsky’s challenge to the NCAA’s authority, the Regents decision freed the football schools to sell any and all games the markets would bear. Coaches and administrators no longer had to share the revenue generated by their athletes with smaller schools outside the football consortium. “We eat what we kill,” one official at the University of Texas bragged.

A few years earlier, this blow might have financially crippled the NCAA—but a rising tide of money from basketball concealed the structural damage of the Regents decision. During the 1980s, income from the March Madness college basketball tournament, paid directly by the television networks to the NCAA, grew tenfold. The windfall covered—and then far exceeded—what the organization had lost from football.

Still, Byers never forgave his former deputy Chuck Neinas for leading the rebel consortium. He knew that Neinas had seen from the inside how tenuous the NCAA’s control really was, and how diligently Byers had worked to prop up its Oz-like façade. During Byers’s tenure, the rule book for Division I athletes grew to 427 pages of scholastic detail.

His NCAA personnel manual banned conversations around water coolers, and coffee cups on desks, while specifying exactly when drapes must be drawn at the NCAA’s 27,000-square-foot headquarters near Kansas City (built in 1973 from the proceeds of a 1 percent surtax on football contracts). It was as though, having lost control where it mattered, Byers pedantically exerted more control where it didn’t.

After retiring in 1987, Byers let slip his suppressed fury that the ingrate football conferences, having robbed the NCAA of television revenue, still expected it to enforce amateurism rules and police every leak of funds to college players. A lethal greed was “gnawing at the innards of college athletics,” he wrote in his memoir.

When Byers renounced the NCAA’s pretense of amateurism, his former colleagues would stare blankly, as though he had gone senile or, as he wrote, “desecrated my sacred vows.” But Byers was better positioned than anyone else to argue that college football’s claim to amateurism was unfounded. Years later, as we will see, lawyers would seize upon his words to do battle with the NCAA.

Meanwhile, reformers fretted that commercialism was hurting college sports, and that higher education’s historical balance between academics and athletics had been distorted by all the money sloshing around.

News stories revealed that schools went to extraordinary measures to keep academically incompetent athletes eligible for competition, and would vie for the most-sought-after high-school players by proffering under-the-table payments. In 1991, the first Knight Commission report, “Keeping Faith With the Student Athlete,” was published; the commission’s “bedrock conviction” was that university presidents must seize control of the NCAA from athletic directors in order to restore the preeminence of academic values over athletic or commercial ones. In response, college presidents did take over the NCAA’s governance.

But by 2001, when the second Knight Commission report (“A Call to Action: Reconnecting College Sports and Higher Education”) was issued, a new generation of reformers was admitting that problems of corruption and commercialism had “grown rather than diminished” since the first report. Meanwhile the NCAA itself, revenues rising, had moved into a $50 million, 116,000-square-foot headquarters in Indianapolis.

By 2010, as the size of NCAA headquarters increased yet again with a 130,000-square-foot expansion, a third Knight Commission was groping blindly for a hold on independent college-athletic conferences that were behaving more like sovereign pro leagues than confederations of universities. And still more money continued to flow into NCAA coffers. With the basketball tournament’s 2011 television deal, annual March Madness broadcast revenues had skyrocketed 50-fold in less than 30 years.

The Myth of the “Student-Athlete”

Today, much of the NCAA’s moral authority—indeed much of the justification for its existence—is vested in its claim to protect what it calls the “student-athlete.” The term is meant to conjure the nobility of amateurism, and the precedence of scholarship over athletic endeavor. But the origins of the “student-athlete” lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed, as the sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has written, to help the NCAA in its “fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.”

“We crafted the term student-athlete,” Walter Byers himself wrote, “and soon it was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations.” The term came into play in the 1950s, when the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died from a head injury received while playing football in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workmen’s-compensation death benefits.

Did his football scholarship make the fatal collision a “work-related” accident? Was he a school employee, like his peers who worked part-time as teaching assistants and bookstore cashiers? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular pursuits? Given the hundreds of incapacitating injuries to college athletes each year, the answers to these questions had enormous consequences. The Colorado Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the school’s contention that he was not eligible for benefits, since the college was “not in the football business.”

The term student-athlete was deliberately ambiguous. College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were high-performance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athlete became the NCAA’s signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms.

Using the “student-athlete” defense, colleges have compiled a string of victories in liability cases. On the afternoon of October 26, 1974, the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs were playing the Alabama Crimson Tide in Birmingham, Alabama. Kent Waldrep, a TCU running back, carried the ball on a “Red Right 28” sweep toward the Crimson Tide’s sideline, where he was met by a swarm of tacklers. When Waldrep regained consciousness, Bear Bryant, the storied Crimson Tide coach, was standing over his hospital bed. “It was like talking to God, if you’re a young football player,” Waldrep recalled.

Waldrep was paralyzed: he had lost all movement and feeling below his neck. After nine months of paying his medical bills, Texas Christian refused to pay any more, so the Waldrep family coped for years on dwindling charity.

Through the 1990s, from his wheelchair, Waldrep pressed a lawsuit for workers’ compensation. (He also, through heroic rehabilitation efforts, recovered feeling in his arms, and eventually learned to drive a specially rigged van. “I can brush my teeth,” he told me last year, “but I still need help to bathe and dress.”)

His attorneys haggled with TCU and the state worker-compensation fund over what constituted employment. Clearly, TCU had provided football players with equipment for the job, as a typical employer would—but did the university pay wages, withhold income taxes on his financial aid, or control work conditions and performance? The appeals court finally rejected Waldrep’s claim in June of 2000, ruling that he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on financial aid that he could have kept even if he quit football. (Waldrep told me school officials “said they recruited me as a student, not an athlete,” which he says was absurd.)

The long saga vindicated the power of the NCAA’s “student-athlete” formulation as a shield, and the organization continues to invoke it as both a legalistic defense and a noble ideal. Indeed, such is the term’s rhetorical power that it is increasingly used as a sort of reflexive mantra against charges of rabid hypocrisy.

Last Thanksgiving weekend, with both the FBI and the NCAA investigating whether Cam Newton had been lured onto his team with illegal payments, Newton’s Auburn Tigers and the Alabama Crimson Tide came together for their annual game, known as the Iron Bowl, before 101,821 fans at Bryant-Denny Stadium.

This game is always a highlight of the football season because of the historic rivalry between the two schools, and the 2010 edition had enormous significance, pitting the defending national champion Crimson Tide against the undefeated Tigers, who were aiming for their first championship since 1957. I expected excited fans; what I encountered was the throbbing heart of college sports. As I drove before daybreak toward the stadium, a sleepless caller babbled over WJOX, the local fan radio station, that he “couldn’t stop thinking about the coin toss.”

In the parking lot, ticketless fans were puzzled that anyone need ask why they had tailgated for days just to watch their satellite-fed flat screens within earshot of the roar. All that morning, pilgrims packed the Bear Bryant museum, where displays elaborated the misery of Alabama’s 4–24 run before the glorious Bryant era dawned in 1958.

Finally, as Auburn took the field for warm-ups, one of Alabama’s public-address-system operators played “Take the Money and Run” (an act for which he would be fired). A sea of signs reading $CAM taunted Newton. The game, perhaps the most exciting of the season, was unbearably tense, with Auburn coming from way behind to win 28–27, all but assuring that it would go on to play for the national championship.

Days later, Auburn suspended Newton after the NCAA found that a rules violation had occurred: his father was alleged to have marketed his son in a pay-for-play scheme; a day after that, the NCAA reinstated Newton’s eligibility because investigators had not found evidence that Newton or Auburn officials had known of his father’s actions. This left Newton conveniently eligible for the Southeastern Conference championship game and for the postseason BCS championship bowl. For the NCAA, prudence meant honoring public demand.

“Our championships,” NCAA President Mark Emmert has declared, “are one of the primary tools we have to enhance the student-athlete experience.”

“Whoremasters”

NCAA v. Regents left the NCAA devoid of television football revenue and almost wholly dependent on March Madness basketball. It is rich but insecure. Last year, CBS Sports and Turner Broadcasting paid $771 million to the NCAA for television rights to the 2011 men’s basketball tournament alone. That’s three-quarters of a billion dollars built on the backs of amateurs—on unpaid labor. The whole edifice depends on the players’ willingness to perform what is effectively volunteer work.

The athletes, and the league officials, are acutely aware of this extraordinary arrangement. William Friday, the former North Carolina president, recalls being yanked from one Knight Commission meeting and sworn to secrecy about what might happen if a certain team made the NCAA championship basketball game. “They were going to dress and go out on the floor,” Friday told me, “but refuse to play,” in a wildcat student strike. Skeptics doubted such a diabolical plot.

These were college kids—unlikely to second-guess their coaches, let alone forfeit the dream of a championship. Still, it was unnerving to contemplate what hung on the consent of a few young volunteers: several hundred million dollars in television revenue, countless livelihoods, the NCAA budget, and subsidies for sports at more than 1,000 schools. Friday’s informants exhaled when the suspect team lost before the finals.

Cognizant of its precarious financial base, the NCAA has in recent years begun to pursue new sources of revenue. Taking its cue from member schools such as Ohio State (which in 2009 bundled all its promotional rights—souvenirs, stadium ads, shoe deals—and outsourced them to the international sports marketer IMG College for a guaranteed $11 million a year), the NCAA began to exploit its vault of college sports on film.

For $29.99 apiece, NCAA On Demand offers DVDs of more than 200 memorable contests in men’s ice hockey alone. Video-game technology also allows nostalgic fans to relive and even participate in classic moments of NCAA Basketball. NCAA Football, licensed by the NCAA through IMG College to Electronic Arts, one of the world’s largest video-game manufacturers, reportedly sold 2.5 million copies in 2008. Brit Kirwan, the chancellor of the Maryland university system and a former president at Ohio State, says there were “terrible fights” between the third Knight Commission and the NCAA over the ethics of generating this revenue.

All of this money ultimately derives from the college athletes whose likenesses are shown in the films or video games. But none of the profits go to them. Last year, Electronic Arts paid more than $35 million in royalties to the NFL players union for the underlying value of names and images in its pro football series—but neither the NCAA nor its affiliated companies paid former college players a nickel.

Naturally, as they have become more of a profit center for the NCAA, some of the vaunted “student-athletes” have begun to clamor that they deserve a share of those profits. You “see everybody getting richer and richer,” Desmond Howard, who won the 1991 Heisman Trophy while playing for the Michigan Wolverines, told USA Today recently. “And you walk around and you can’t put gas in your car? You can’t even fly home to see your parents?”

Some athletes have gone beyond talk. A series of lawsuits quietly making their way through the courts cast a harsh light on the absurdity of the system—and threaten to dislodge the foundations on which the NCAA rests. On July 21, 2009, lawyers for Ed O’Bannon filed a class-action antitrust suit against the NCAA at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

“Once you leave your university,” says O’Bannon, who won the John Wooden Award for player of the year in 1995 on UCLA’s national-championship basketball team, “one would think your likeness belongs to you.”

The NCAA and UCLA continue to collect money from the sales of videos of him playing. But by NCAA rules, O’Bannon, who today works at a Toyota dealership near Las Vegas, alleges he is still not allowed to share the revenue the NCAA generates from his own image as a college athlete.

His suit quickly gathered co-plaintiffs from basketball and football, ex-players featured in NCAA videos and other products. “The NCAA does not license student-athlete likenesses,” NCAA spokesperson Erik Christianson told The New York Times in response to the suit, “or prevent former student-athletes from attempting to do so. Likewise, to claim the NCAA profits off student-athlete likenesses is also pure fiction.”

The legal contention centers on Part IV of the NCAA’s “Student-Athlete Statement” for Division I, which requires every athlete to authorize use of “your name or picture … to promote NCAA championships or other NCAA events, activities or programs.”

Does this clause mean that athletes clearly renounce personal interest forever? If so, does it actually undermine the NCAA by implicitly recognizing that athletes have a property right in their own performance? Jon King, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, expects the NCAA’s core mission of amateurism to be its “last defense standing.”

In theory, the NCAA’s passion to protect the noble amateurism of college athletes should prompt it to focus on head coaches in the high-revenue sports—basketball and football—since holding the top official accountable should most efficiently discourage corruption.

The problem is that the coaches’ growing power has rendered them, unlike their players, ever more immune to oversight. According to research by Charles Clotfelter, an economist at Duke, the average compensation for head football coaches at public universities, now more than $2 million, has grown 750 percent (adjusted for inflation) since the Regents decision in 1984; that’s more than 20 times the cumulative 32 percent raise for college professors.

For top basketball coaches, annual contracts now exceed $4 million, augmented by assorted bonuses, endorsements, country-club memberships, the occasional private plane, and in some cases a negotiated percentage of ticket receipts. (Oregon’s ticket concessions netted former football coach Mike Bellotti an additional $631,000 in 2005.)

The NCAA rarely tangles with such people, who are apt to fight back and win. When Rick Neuheisel, the head football coach of the Washington Huskies, was punished for petty gambling (in a March Madness pool, as it happened), he sued the NCAA and the university for wrongful termination, collected $4.5 million, and later moved on to UCLA. When the NCAA tried to cap assistant coaches’ entering salary at a mere $16,000, nearly 2,000 of them brought an antitrust suit, Law v. NCAA, and in 1999 settled for $54.5 million.

Since then, salaries for assistant coaches have commonly exceeded $200,000, with the top assistants in the SEC averaging $700,000. In 2009, Monte Kiffin, then at the University of Tennessee, became the first assistant coach to reach $1 million, plus benefits.

The late Myles Brand, who led the NCAA from 2003 to 2009, defended the economics of college sports by claiming that they were simply the result of a smoothly functioning free market. He and his colleagues deflected criticism about the money saturating big-time college sports by focusing attention on scapegoats; in 2010, outrage targeted sports agents.

Last year Sports Illustrated published “Confessions of an Agent,” a firsthand account of dealing with high-strung future pros whom the agent and his peers courted with flattery, cash, and tawdry favors. Nick Saban, Alabama’s head football coach, mobilized his peers to denounce agents as a public scourge. “I hate to say this,” he said, “but how are they any better than a pimp? I have no respect for people who do that to young people. None.”

Saban’s raw condescension contrasts sharply with the lonely penitence from Dale Brown, the retired longtime basketball coach at LSU. “Look at the money we make off predominantly poor black kids,” Brown once reflected. “We’re the whoremasters.”

“Picayune Rules”

NCAA officials have tried to assert their dominion—and distract attention from the larger issues—by chasing frantically after petty violations. Tom McMillen, a former member of the Knight Commission who was an All-American basketball player at the University of Maryland, likens these officials to traffic cops in a speed trap, who could flag down almost any passing motorist for prosecution in kangaroo court under a “maze of picayune rules.” The publicized cases have become convoluted soap operas.

At the start of the 2010 football season, A. J. Green, a wide receiver at Georgia, confessed that he’d sold his own jersey from the Independence Bowl the year before, to raise cash for a spring-break vacation. The NCAA sentenced Green to a four-game suspension for violating his amateur status with the illicit profit generated by selling the shirt off his own back. While he served the suspension, the Georgia Bulldogs store continued legally selling replicas of Green’s No. 8 jersey for $39.95 and up.

A few months later, the NCAA investigated rumors that Ohio State football players had benefited from “hook-ups on tatts”—that is, that they’d gotten free or underpriced tattoos at an Ohio tattoo parlor in exchange for autographs and memorabilia—a violation of the NCAA’s rule against discounts linked to athletic personae.

The NCAA Committee on Infractions imposed five-game suspensions on Terrelle Pryor, Ohio State’s tattooed quarterback, and four other players (some of whom had been found to have sold their Big Ten championship rings and other gear), but did permit them to finish the season and play in the Sugar Bowl. (This summer, in an attempt to satisfy NCAA investigators, Ohio State voluntarily vacated its football wins from last season, as well as its Sugar Bowl victory.)

A different NCAA committee promulgated a rule banning symbols and messages in players’ eyeblack—reportedly aimed at Pryor’s controversial gesture of support for the pro quarterback Michael Vick, and at Bible verses inscribed in the eyeblack of the former Florida quarterback Tim Tebow.

The moral logic is hard to fathom: the NCAA bans personal messages on the bodies of the players, and penalizes players for trading their celebrity status for discounted tattoos—but it codifies precisely how and where commercial insignia from multinational corporations can be displayed on college players, for the financial benefit of the colleges.

Last season, while the NCAA investigated him and his father for the recruiting fees they’d allegedly sought, Cam Newton compliantly wore at least 15 corporate logos—one on his jersey, four on his helmet visor, one on each wristband, one on his pants, six on his shoes, and one on the headband he wears under his helmet—as part of Auburn’s $10.6 million deal with Under Armour.

“Restitution”

Obscure NCAA rules have bedeviled Scott Boras, the preeminent sports agent for Major League Baseball stars, in cases that may ultimately prove more threatening to the NCAA than Ed O’Bannon’s antitrust suit. In 2008, Andrew Oliver, a sophomore pitcher for the Oklahoma State Cowboys, had been listed as the 12th-best professional prospect among sophomore players nationally. He decided to dismiss the two attorneys who had represented him out of high school, Robert and Tim Baratta, and retain Boras instead.

Infuriated, the Barattas sent a spiteful letter to the NCAA. Oliver didn’t learn about this until the night before he was scheduled to pitch in the regional final for a place in the College World Series, when an NCAA investigator showed up to question him in the presence of lawyers for Oklahoma State. The investigator also questioned his father, Dave, a truck driver.

Had Tim Baratta been present in their home when the Minnesota Twins offered $390,000 for Oliver to sign out of high school? A yes would mean trouble. While the NCAA did not forbid all professional advice—indeed, Baseball America used to publish the names of agents representing draft-likely underclassmen—NCAA Bylaw 12.3.2.1 prohibited actual negotiation with any professional team by an adviser, on pain of disqualification for the college athlete. The questioning lasted past midnight.

Just hours before the game was to start the next day, Oklahoma State officials summoned Oliver to tell him he would not be pitching. Only later did he learn that the university feared that by letting him play while the NCAA adjudicated his case, the university would open not only the baseball team but all other Oklahoma State teams to broad punishment under the NCAA’s “restitution rule” (Bylaw 19.7), under which the NCAA threatens schools with sanctions if they obey any temporary court order benefiting a college athlete, should that order eventually be modified or removed. The baseball coach did not even let his ace tell his teammates the sad news in person. “He said, ‘It’s probably not a good idea for you to be at the game,’” Oliver recalls.

The Olivers went home to Ohio to find a lawyer. Rick Johnson, a solo practitioner specializing in legal ethics, was aghast that the Baratta brothers had turned in their own client to the NCAA, divulging attorney-client details likely to invite wrath upon Oliver. But for the next 15 months, Johnson directed his litigation against the two NCAA bylaws at issue.

Judge Tygh M. Tone, of Erie County, came to share his outrage. On February 12, 2009, Tone struck down the ban on lawyers negotiating for student-athletes as a capricious, exploitative attempt by a private association to “dictate to an attorney where, what, how, or when he should represent his client,” violating accepted legal practice in every state.

He also struck down the NCAA’s restitution rule as an intimidation that attempted to supersede the judicial system. Finally, Judge Tone ordered the NCAA to reinstate Oliver’s eligibility at Oklahoma State for his junior season, which started several days later.

The NCAA sought to disqualify Oliver again, with several appellate motions to stay “an unprecedented Order purporting to void a fundamental Bylaw.” Oliver did get to pitch that season, but he dropped into the second round of the June 2009 draft, signing for considerably less than if he’d been picked earlier. Now 23, Oliver says sadly that the whole experience “made me grow up a little quicker.” His lawyer claimed victory. “Andy Oliver is the first college athlete ever to win against the NCAA in court,” said Rick Johnson.

Yet the victory was only temporary. Wounded, the NCAA fought back with a vengeance. Its battery of lawyers prepared for a damages trial, ultimately overwhelming Oliver’s side eight months later with an offer to resolve the dispute for $750,000.

When Oliver and Johnson accepted, to extricate themselves ahead of burgeoning legal costs, Judge Tone was compelled to vacate his orders as part of the final settlement. This freed NCAA officials to reassert the two bylaws that Judge Tone had so forcefully overturned, and they moved swiftly to ramp up rather than curtail enforcement.

First, the NCAA’s Eligibility Center devised a survey for every drafted undergraduate athlete who sought to stay in college another year. The survey asked whether an agent had conducted negotiations. It also requested a signed release waiving privacy rights and authorizing professional teams to disclose details of any interaction to the NCAA Eligibility Center. Second, NCAA enforcement officials went after another Scott Boras client.

The Toronto Blue Jays had made the left-handed pitcher James Paxton, of the University of Kentucky, the 37th pick in the 2009 draft. Paxton decided to reject a reported $1 million offer and return to school for his senior year, pursuing a dream to pitch for his team in the College World Series. But then he ran into the new NCAA survey. Had Boras negotiated with the Blue Jays?

Boras has denied that he did, but it would have made sense that he had—that was his job, to test the market for his client. But saying so would get Paxton banished under the same NCAA bylaw that had derailed Andrew Oliver’s career.

Since Paxton was planning to go back to school and not accept their draft offer, the Blue Jays no longer had any incentive to protect him—indeed, they had every incentive to turn him in. The Blue Jays’ president, by telling reporters that Boras had negotiated on Paxton’s behalf, demonstrated to future recruits and other teams that they could use the NCAA’s rules to punish college players who wasted their draft picks by returning to college. The NCAA’s enforcement staff raised the pressure by requesting to interview Paxton.

Though Paxton had no legal obligation to talk to an investigator, NCAA Bylaw 10.1(j) specified that anything short of complete cooperation could be interpreted as unethical conduct, affecting his amateur status. Under its restitution rule, the NCAA had leverage to compel the University of Kentucky to ensure obedience.

As the 2010 season approached, Gary Henderson, the Kentucky coach, sorely wanted Paxton, one of Baseball America’s top-ranked players, to return. Rick Johnson, Andrew Oliver’s lawyer, filed for a declaratory judgment on Paxton’s behalf, arguing that the state constitution—plus the university’s code of student conduct—barred arbitrary discipline at the request of a third party.

Kentucky courts deferred to the university, however, and Paxton was suspended from the team. “Due to the possibility of future penalties, including forfeiture of games,” the university stated, it “could not put the other 32 players of the team and the entire UK 22-sport intercollegiate athletics department at risk by having James compete.” The NCAA appraised the result with satisfaction.

“When negotiations occur on behalf of student-athletes,” Erik Christianson, the NCAA spokesperson, told The New York Times in reference to the Oliver case, “those negotiations indicate that the student-athlete intends to become a professional athlete and no longer remain an amateur.”

Paxton was stranded. Not only could he not play for Kentucky, but his draft rights with the Blue Jays had lapsed for the year, meaning he could not play for any minor-league affiliate of Major League Baseball. Boras wrangled a holdover job for him in Texas with the independent Grand Prairie AirHogs, pitching against the Pensacola Pelicans and Wichita Wingnuts.

Once projected to be a first-round draft pick, Paxton saw his stock plummet into the fourth round. He remained unsigned until late in spring training, when he signed with the Seattle Mariners and reported to their minor-league camp in Peoria, Arizona.

“You Might As Well Shoot Them in the Head”

“When you dream about playing in college,” Joseph Agnew told me not long ago, “you don’t ever think about being in a lawsuit.” Agnew, a student at Rice University in Houston, had been cut from the football team and had his scholarship revoked by Rice before his senior year, meaning that he faced at least $35,000 in tuition and other bills if he wanted to complete his degree in sociology.

Bereft of his scholarship, he was flailing about for help when he discovered the National College Players Association, which claims 7,000 active members and seeks modest reforms such as safety guidelines and better death benefits for college athletes. Agnew was struck by the NCPA scholarship data on players from top Division I basketball teams, which showed that 22 percent were not renewed from 2008 to 2009—the same fate he had suffered.

In October 2010, Agnew filed a class-action antitrust suit over the cancellation of his scholarship and to remove the cap on the total number of scholarships that can be awarded by NCAA schools. In his suit, Agnew did not claim the right to free tuition. He merely asked the federal court to strike down an NCAA rule, dating to 1973, that prohibited colleges and universities from offering any athletic scholarship longer than a one-year commitment, to be renewed or not, unilaterally, by the school—which in practice means that coaches get to decide each year whose scholarships to renew or cancel. (After the coach who had recruited Agnew had moved on to Tulsa, the new Rice coach switched Agnew’s scholarship to a recruit of his own.)

Agnew argued that without the one-year rule, he would have been free to bargain with all eight colleges that had recruited him, and each college could have decided how long to guarantee his scholarship.

Agnew’s suit rested on a claim of an NCAA antitrust violation combined with a laudable academic goal—making it possible for students to finish their educations. Around the same time, lawyers from President Obama’s Justice Department initiated a series of meetings with NCAA officials and universities in which they asked what possible educational rationale there was for allowing the NCAA—an organization that did not itself pay for scholarships—to impose a blanket restriction on the length of scholarships offered by colleges.

Tidbits leaked into the press. In response, the NCAA contended that an athletic scholarship was a “merit award” that should be reviewed annually, presumably because the degree of “merit” could change. Justice Department lawyers reportedly suggested that a free market in scholarships would expand learning opportunities in accord with the stated rationale for the NCAA’s tax-exempt status—that it promotes education through athletics.

The one-year rule effectively allows colleges to cut underperforming “student-athletes,” just as pro sports teams cut their players. “Plenty of them don’t stay in school,” said one of Agnew’s lawyers, Stuart Paynter. “They’re just gone. You might as well shoot them in the head.”

Agnew’s lawsuit has made him a pariah to former friends in the athletic department at Rice, where everyone identified so thoroughly with the NCAA that they seemed to feel he was attacking them personally. But if the premise of Agnew’s case is upheld by the courts, it will make a sham of the NCAA’s claim that its highest priority is protecting education.

“They Want to Crush These Kids”

Academic performance has always been difficult for the NCAA to address. Any detailed regulation would intrude upon the free choice of widely varying schools, and any academic standard broad enough to fit both MIT and Ole Miss would have little force.

From time to time, a scandal will expose extreme lapses. In 1989, Dexter Manley, by then the famous “Secretary of Defense” for the NFL’s Washington Redskins, teared up before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts, and Humanities, when admitting that he had been functionally illiterate in college.

Within big-time college athletic departments, the financial pressure to disregard obvious academic shortcomings and shortcuts is just too strong. In the 1980s, Jan Kemp, an English instructor at the University of Georgia, publicly alleged that university officials had demoted and then fired her because she refused to inflate grades in her remedial English courses.

Documents showed that administrators replaced the grades she’d given athletes with higher ones, providing fake passing grades on one notable occasion to nine Bulldog football players who otherwise would have been ineligible to compete in the 1982 Sugar Bowl. (Georgia lost anyway, 24–20, to a University of Pittsburgh team led by the future Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino.)

When Kemp filed a lawsuit against the university, she was publicly vilified as a troublemaker, but she persisted bravely in her testimony. Once, Kemp said, a supervisor demanding that she fix a grade had bellowed, “Who do you think is more important to this university, you or Dominique Wilkins?” (Wilkins was a star on the basketball team.) Traumatized, Kemp twice attempted suicide.

In trying to defend themselves, Georgia officials portrayed Kemp as naive about sports. “We have to compete on a level playing field,” said Fred Davison, the university president. During the Kemp civil trial, in 1986, Hale Almand, Georgia’s defense lawyer, explained the university’s patronizing aspirations for its typical less-than-scholarly athlete.

“We may not make a university student out of him,” Almand told the court, “but if we can teach him to read and write, maybe he can work at the post office rather than as a garbage man when he gets through with his athletic career.” This argument backfired with the jurors: finding in favor of Kemp, they rejected her polite request for $100,000, and awarded her $2.6 million in damages instead. (This was later reduced to $1.08 million.) Jan Kemp embodied what is ostensibly the NCAA’s reason for being—to enforce standards fairly and put studies above sports—but no one from the organization ever spoke up on her behalf.

The NCAA body charged with identifying violations of any of the Division I league rules, the Committee on Infractions, operates in the shadows. Josephine Potuto, a professor of law at the University of Nebraska and a longtime committee member who was then serving as its vice chair, told Congress in 2004 that one reason her group worked in secret was that it hoped to avoid a “media circus.”

The committee preferred to deliberate in private, she said, guiding member schools to punish themselves. “The enforcement process is cooperative, not adversarial,” Potuto testified. The committee consisted of an elite coterie of judges, athletic directors, and authors of legal treatises. “The committee also is savvy about intercollegiate athletics,” she added. “They cannot be conned.”

In 2009, a series of unlikely circumstances peeled back the veil of secrecy to reveal NCAA procedures so contorted that even victims marveled at their comical wonder. The saga began in March of 2007, shortly after the Florida State Seminoles basketball team was knocked out of the NIT basketball tournament, which each spring invites the best teams not selected for the March Madness tournament.

At an athletic-department study hall, Al Thornton, a star forward for the team, completed a sports-psychology quiz but then abandoned it without posting his written answers electronically by computer. Brenda Monk, an academic tutor for the Seminoles, says she noticed the error and asked a teammate to finish entering Thornton’s answers onscreen and hit “submit,” as required for credit.

The teammate complied, steaming silently, and then complained at the athletic office about getting stuck with clean-up chores for the superstar Thornton (who was soon to be selected by the Los Angeles Clippers in the first round of the NBA draft). Monk promptly resigned when questioned by FSU officials, saying her fatigue at the time could not excuse her asking the teammate to submit the answers to another student’s completed test.

Monk’s act of guileless responsibility set off a chain reaction. First, FSU had to give the NCAA preliminary notice of a confessed academic fraud. Second, because this would be its seventh major infraction case since 1968, FSU mounted a vigorous self-investigation to demonstrate compliance with NCAA academic rules.

Third, interviews with 129 Seminoles athletes unleashed a nightmare of matter-of-fact replies about absentee professors who allowed group consultations and unlimited retakes of open-computer assignments and tests. Fourth, FSU suspended 61 of its athletes in 10 sports. Fifth, the infractions committee applied the byzantine NCAA bylaws to FSU’s violations. Sixth, one of the penalties announced in March of 2009 caused a howl of protest across the sports universe.

Twenty-seven news organizations filed a lawsuit in hopes of finding out how and why the NCAA proposed to invalidate 14 prior victories in FSU football. Such a penalty, if upheld, would doom coach Bobby Bowden’s chance of overtaking Joe Paterno of Penn State for the most football wins in Division I history. This was sacrosanct territory.

Sports reporters followed the litigation for six months, reporting that 25 of the 61 suspended FSU athletes were football players, some of whom were ruled ineligible retroactively from the time they had heard or yelled out answers to online test questions in, of all things, a music-appreciation course.

When reporters sought access to the transcript of the infractions committee’s hearing in Indianapolis, NCAA lawyers said the 695-page document was private. (The NCAA claimed it was entitled to keep all such records secret because of a landmark Supreme Court ruling that it had won in 1988, in NCAA v. Tarkanian, which exempted the organization from any due-process obligations because it was not a government organization.)

Media outlets pressed the judge to let Florida State share its own copy of the hearing transcript, whereupon NCAA lawyers objected that the school had never actually “possessed” the document; it had only seen the transcript via a defendant’s guest access to the carefully restricted NCAA Web site. This claim, in turn, prompted intercession on the side of the media by Florida’s attorney general, arguing that letting the NCAA use a technical loophole like this would undermine the state’s sunshine law mandating open public records. After tumultuous appeals, the Florida courts agreed and ordered the NCAA transcript released in October of 2009.

News interest quickly evaporated when the sports media found nothing in the record about Coach Bowden or the canceled football victories. But the transcript revealed plenty about the NCAA. On page 37, T. K. Wetherell, the bewildered Florida State president, lamented that his university had hurt itself by cooperating with the investigation.

“We self-reported this case,” he said during the hearing, and he later complained that the most ingenuous athletes—those who asked “What’s the big deal, this happens all the time?”—received the harshest suspensions, while those who clammed up on the advice of lawyers went free. The music-appreciation professor was apparently never questioned. Brenda Monk, the only instructor who consistently cooperated with the investigation, appeared voluntarily to explain her work with learning-disabled athletes, only to be grilled about her credentials by Potuto in a pettifogging inquisition of remarkable stamina.

In January of last year, the NCAA’s Infractions Appeals Committee sustained all the sanctions imposed on FSU except the number of vacated football victories, which it dropped, ex cathedra, from 14 to 12. The final penalty locked Bobby Bowden’s official win total on retirement at 377 instead of 389, behind Joe Paterno’s 401 (and counting). This carried stinging symbolism for fans, without bringing down on the NCAA the harsh repercussions it would have risked if it had issued a television ban or substantial fine.

Cruelly, but typically, the NCAA concentrated public censure on powerless scapegoats. A dreaded “show cause” order rendered Brenda Monk, the tutor, effectively unhirable at any college in the United States. Cloaking an old-fashioned blackball in the stately language of law, the order gave notice that any school hiring Monk before a specified date in 2013 “shall, pursuant to the provisions of Bylaw 19.5.2.2(l), show cause why it should not be penalized if it does not restrict the former learning specialist [Monk] from having any contact with student-athletes.” Today she works as an education supervisor at a prison in Florida.

The Florida State verdict hardly surprised Rick Johnson, the lawyer who had represented the college pitchers Andrew Oliver and James Paxton. “All the NCAA’s enforcements are random and selective,” he told me, calling the organization’s appeals process a travesty. (Johnson says the NCAA has never admitted to having wrongly suspended an athlete.)

Johnson’s scalding experience prompted him to undertake a law-review article on the subject, which in turn sent him trawling through NCAA archives. From the summary tax forms required of nonprofits, he found out that the NCAA had spent nearly $1 million chartering private jets in 2006. “What kind of nonprofit organization leases private jets?,” Johnson asks.

It’s hard to determine from tax returns what money goes where, but it looks as if the NCAA spent less than 1 percent of its budget on enforcement that year. Even after its plump cut for its own overhead, the NCAA dispersed huge sums to its 1,200 member schools, in the manner of a professional sports league. These annual payments are universal—every college gets something—but widely uneven.

They keep the disparate shareholders (barely) united and speaking for all of college sports. The payments coerce unity within the structure of a private association that is unincorporated and unregulated, exercising amorphous powers not delegated by any government.

Searching through the archives, Johnson came across a 1973 memo from the NCAA general counsel recommending the adoption of a due-process procedure for athletes in disciplinary cases. Without it, warned the organization’s lawyer, the association risked big liability claims for deprivation of rights.

His proposal went nowhere. Instead, apparently to limit costs to the universities, Walter Byers had implemented the year-by-year scholarship rule that Joseph Agnew would challenge in court 37 years later. Moreover, the NCAA’s 1975 convention adopted a second recommendation “to discourage legal actions against the NCAA,” according to the minutes.

The members voted to create Bylaw 19.7, Restitution, to intimidate college athletes in disputes with the NCAA. Johnson recognized this provision all too well, having won the temporary court judgment that the rule was illegal if not downright despotic. It made him nearly apoplectic to learn that the NCAA had deliberately drawn up the restitution rule as an obstacle to due process, contrary to the recommendation of its own lawyer. “They want to crush these kids,” he says.

The NCAA, of course, has never expressed such a desire, and its public comments on due process tend to be anodyne. At a congressional hearing in 2004, the infractions-committee vice chair, Josephine Potuto, repeatedly argued that although the NCAA is “not bound by any judicial due process standards,” its enforcement, infractions, and hearing procedures meet and “very likely exceed” those of other public institutions.

Yet when pressed, Potuto declared that athletes would have no standing for due process even if the Supreme Court had not exempted the NCAA in the 1988 Tarkanian decision. “In order to reach due-process issues as a legal Constitutional principle, the individual challenging has to have a substantive property or liberty interest,” she testified. “The opportunity to play intercollegiate athletics does not rise to that level.”

To translate this from the legal jargon, Potuto used a circular argument to confine college athletes beneath any right to freedom or property in their own athletic effort. They have no stake to seek their rights, she claimed, because they have no rights at stake.

Potuto’s assertion might be judged preposterous, an heir of the Dred Scott dictum that slaves possessed no rights a white person was bound to respect. But she was merely being honest, articulating assumptions almost everyone shares without question.

Whether motivated by hostility for students (as critics like Johnson allege), or by noble and paternalistic tough love (as the NCAA professes), the denial of fundamental due process for college athletes has stood unchallenged in public discourse. Like other NCAA rules, it emanates naturally from the premise that college athletes own no interest in sports beyond exercise, character-building, and good fun. Who represents these young men and women? No one asks.

The debates and commissions about reforming college sports nibble around the edges—trying to reduce corruption, to prevent the “contamination” of athletes by lucre, and to maintain at least a pretense of concern for academic integrity. Everything stands on the implicit presumption that preserving amateurism is necessary for the well-being of college athletes.

But while amateurism—and the free labor it provides—may be necessary to the preservation of the NCAA, and perhaps to the profit margins of various interested corporations and educational institutions, what if it doesn’t benefit the athletes? What if it hurts them?

“The Plantation Mentality”

“Ninety percent of the NCAA revenue is produced by 1 percent of the athletes,” Sonny Vaccaro says. “Go to the skill positions”—the stars. “Ninety percent African Americans.” The NCAA made its money off those kids, and so did he. They were not all bad people, the NCAA officials, but they were blind, Vaccaro believes. “Their organization is a fraud.”

Vaccaro retired from Reebok in 2007 to make a clean break for a crusade. “The kids and their parents gave me a good life,” he says in his peppery staccato. “I want to give something back.” Call it redemption, he told me. Call it education or a good cause. “Here’s what I preach,” said Vaccaro. “This goes beyond race, to human rights. The least educated are the most exploited. I’m probably closer to the kids than anyone else, and I’m 71 years old.”

Vaccaro is officially an unpaid consultant to the plaintiffs in O’Bannon v. NCAA. He connected Ed O’Bannon with the attorneys who now represent him, and he talked to some of the additional co-plaintiffs who have joined the suit, among them Oscar Robertson, a basketball Hall of Famer who was incensed that the NCAA was still selling his image on playing cards 50 years after he left the University of Cincinnati.

Jon King, an antitrust lawyer at Hausfeld LLP in San Francisco, told me that Vaccaro “opened our eyes to massive revenue streams hidden in college sports.” King and his colleagues have drawn on Vaccaro’s vast knowledge of athletic-department finances, which include off-budget accounts for shoe contracts.

Sonny Vaccaro and his wife, Pam, “had a mountain of documents,” he said. The outcome of the 1984 Regents decision validated an antitrust approach for O’Bannon, King argues, as well as for Joseph Agnew in his continuing case against the one-year scholarship rule. Lawyers for Sam Keller—a former quarterback for the University of Nebraska who is featured in video games—are pursuing a parallel “right of publicity” track based on the First Amendment.

Still other lawyers could revive Rick Johnson’s case against NCAA bylaws on a larger scale, and King thinks claims for the rights of college players may be viable also under laws pertaining to contracts, employment, and civil rights.

Vaccaro had sought a law firm for O’Bannon with pockets deep enough to withstand an expensive war of attrition, fearing that NCAA officials would fight discovery to the end. So far, though, they have been forthcoming. “The numbers are off the wall,” Vaccaro says. “The public will see for the first time how all the money is distributed.”

Vaccaro has been traveling the after-dinner circuit, proselytizing against what he sees as the NCAA’s exploitation of young athletes. Late in 2008, someone who heard his stump speech at Howard University mentioned it to Michael Hausfeld, a prominent antitrust and human-rights lawyer, whose firm had won suits against Exxon for Native Alaskans and against Union Bank of Switzerland for Holocaust victims’ families. Someone tracked down Vaccaro on vacation in Athens, Greece, and he flew back directly to meet Hausfeld. The shoe salesman and the white-shoe lawyer made common cause.

Hausfeld LLP has offices in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and London. Its headquarters are on K Street in Washington, D.C., about three blocks from the White House. When I talked with Hausfeld there not long ago, he sat in a cavernous conference room, tidy in pinstripes, hands folded on a spotless table that reflected the skyline.

He spoke softly, without pause, condensing the complex fugue of antitrust litigation into simple sentences. “Let’s start with the basic question,” he said, noting that the NCAA claims that student-athletes have no property rights in their own athletic accomplishments. Yet, in order to be eligible to play, college athletes have to waive their rights to proceeds from any sales based on their athletic performance.

“What right is it that they’re waiving?,” Hausfeld asked. “You can’t waive something you don’t have. So they had a right that they gave up in consideration to the principle of amateurism, if there be such.” (At an April hearing in a U.S. District Court in California, Gregory Curtner, a representative for the NCAA, stunned O’Bannon’s lawyers by saying: “There is no document, there is no substance, that the NCAA ever takes from the student-athletes their rights of publicity or their rights of likeness. They are at all times owned by the student-athlete.” Jon King says this is “like telling someone they have the winning lottery ticket, but by the way, it can only be cashed in on Mars.” The court denied for a second time an NCAA motion to dismiss the O’Bannon complaint.)

The waiver clause is nestled among the paragraphs of the “Student-Athlete Statement” that NCAA rules require be collected yearly from every college athlete. In signing the statement, the athletes attest that they have amateur status, that their stated SAT scores are valid, that they are willing to disclose any educational documents requested, and so forth. Already, Hausfeld said, the defendants in the Ed O’Bannon case have said in court filings that college athletes thereby transferred their promotional rights forever. He paused.

“That’s ludicrous,” he said. “Nobody assigns rights like that. Nobody can assert rights like that.” He said the pattern demonstrated clear abuse by the collective power of the schools and all their conferences under the NCAA umbrella—“a most effective cartel.”

The faux ideal of amateurism is “the elephant in the room,” Hausfeld said, sending for a book. “You can’t get to the bottom of our case without exposing the hypocrisy of amateurism, and Walter Byers says it eloquently.” An assistant brought in Byers’s memoir. It looked garish on the shiny table because dozens of pink Post-its protruded from the text. Hausfeld read to me from page 390:

The college player cannot sell his own feet (the coach does that) nor can he sell his own name (the college will do that). This is the plantation mentality resurrected and blessed by today’s campus executives.

He looked up. “That wasn’t me,” he said. “That was the NCAA’s architect.” He found a key recommendation on page 388:

Prosecutors and the courts, with the support of the public, should use antitrust laws to break up the collegiate cartel—not just in athletics but possibly in other aspects of collegiate life as well.

Could the book become evidence? Might the aged Byers testify? (He is now 89.) Was that part of the plaintiffs’ strategy for the O’Bannon trial? Hausfeld smiled faintly. “I’d rather the NCAA lawyers not fully understand the strategy,” he said.

He put the spiny book away and previewed what lies ahead. The court soon would qualify his clients as a class. Then the Sherman Antitrust Act would provide for thorough discovery to break down exactly what the NCAA receives on everything from video clips to jerseys, contract by contract. “And we want to know what they’re carrying on their books as the value of their archival footage,” he concluded. “They say it’s a lot of money. We agree. How much?”

The work will be hard, but Hausfeld said he will win in the courts, unless the NCAA folds first. “Why?” Hausfeld asked rhetorically. “We know our clients are foreclosed: neither the NCAA nor its members will permit them to participate in any of that licensing revenue. Under the law, it’s up to them [the defendants] to give a pro-competitive justification. They can’t. End of story.”

In 2010 the third Knight Commission, complementing a previous commission’s recommendation for published reports on academic progress, called for the finances of college sports to be made transparent and public—television contracts, conference budgets, shoe deals, coaches’ salaries, stadium bonds, everything.

The recommendation was based on the worthy truism that sunlight is a proven disinfectant. But in practice, it has not been applied at all. Conferences, coaches, and other stakeholders resisted disclosure; college players still have no way of determining their value to the university.

“Money surrounds college sports,” says Domonique Foxworth, who is a cornerback for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens and an executive-committee member for the NFL Players Association, and played for the University of Maryland. “And every player knows those millions are floating around only because of the 18-to-22-year-olds.”

Yes, he told me, even the second-string punter believes a miracle might lift him into the NFL, and why not? In all the many pages of the three voluminous Knight Commission reports, there is but one paragraph that addresses the real-life choices for college athletes. “Approximately 1 percent of NCAA men’s basketball players and 2 percent of NCAA football players are drafted by NBA or NFL teams,” stated the 2001 report, basing its figures on a review of the previous 10 years, “and just being drafted is no assurance of a successful professional career.”

Warning that the odds against professional athletic success are “astronomically high,” the Knight Commission counsels college athletes to avoid a “rude surprise” and to stick to regular studies. This is sound advice as far as it goes, but it’s a bromide that pinches off discussion. Nothing in the typical college curriculum teaches a sweat-stained guard at Clemson or Purdue what his monetary value to the university is.

Nothing prods students to think independently about amateurism—because the universities themselves have too much invested in its preservation. Stifling thought, the universities, in league with the NCAA, have failed their own primary mission by providing an empty, cynical education on college sports.

The most basic reform would treat the students as what they are—adults, with rights and reason of their own—and grant them a meaningful voice in NCAA deliberations. A restoration of full citizenship to “student-athletes” would facilitate open governance, making it possible to enforce pledges of transparency in both academic standards and athletic finances.

Without that, the NCAA has no effective checks and balances, no way for the students to provide informed consent regarding the way they are governed. A thousand questions lie willfully silenced because the NCAA is naturally afraid of giving “student-athletes” a true voice.

Would college players be content with the augmented scholarship or allowance now requested by the National College Players Association? If a player’s worth to the university is greater than the value of his scholarship (as it clearly is in some cases), should he be paid a salary?

If so, would teammates in revenue sports want to be paid equally, or in salaries stratified according to talent or value on the field? What would the athletes want in Division III, where athletic budgets keep rising without scholarships or substantial sports revenue?

Would athletes seek more or less variance in admissions standards? Should non-athletes also have a voice, especially where involuntary student fees support more and more of college sports? Might some schools choose to specialize, paying players only in elite leagues for football, or lacrosse? In athletic councils, how much would high-revenue athletes value a simple thank you from the tennis or field-hockey players for the newly specified subsidies to their facilities?

University administrators, already besieged from all sides, do not want to even think about such questions. Most cringe at the thought of bargaining with athletes as a general manager does in professional sports, with untold effects on the budgets for coaches and every other sports item. “I would not want to be part of it,” North Carolina Athletic Director Dick Baddour told me flatly. After 44 years at UNC, he could scarcely contemplate a world without amateur rules. “We would have to think long and hard,” Baddour added gravely, “about whether this university would continue those sports at all.”

I, too, once reflexively recoiled at the idea of paying college athletes and treating them like employees or professionals. It feels abhorrent—but for reasons having to do more with sentiment than with practicality or law. Not just fans and university presidents but judges have often found cursory, non-statutory excuses to leave amateur traditions intact.

“Even in the increasingly commercial modern world,” said a federal-court judge in Gaines v. NCAA in 1990, “this Court believes there is still validity to the Athenian concept of a complete education derived from fostering the full growth of both mind and body.” The fact that “the NCAA has not distilled amateurism to its purest form,” said the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1988, “does not mean its attempts to maintain a mixture containing some amateur elements are unreasonable.”

But one way or another, the smokescreen of amateurism may soon be swept away. For one thing, a victory by the plaintiffs in O’Bannon’s case would radically transform college sports. Colleges would likely have to either stop profiting from students or start paying them. The NCAA could also be forced to pay tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in damages. If O’Bannon and Vaccaro and company win, “it will turn college sports on its ear,” said Richard Lapchick, the president of the National Consortium for Academics and Sports, in a recent interview with The New York Times.

Though the O’Bannon case may take several years yet to reach resolution, developments on other fronts are chipping away at amateurism, and at the NCAA. This past summer, Sports Illustrated editorialized in favor of allowing college athletes to be paid by non-university sources without jeopardizing their eligibility.

At a press conference last June, Steve Spurrier, the coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks football team (and the winner of the 1966 Heisman Trophy as a Florida Gator), proposed that coaches start paying players $300 a game out of their own pockets.

The coaches at six other SEC schools (Alabama, Florida, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, LSU, and Tennessee) all endorsed Spurrier’s proposal. And Mark Emmert, the NCAA president, recently conceded that big changes must come. “The integrity of collegiate athletics is seriously challenged today by rapidly growing pressures coming from many directions,” Emmert said in July.

“We have reached a point where incremental change is not sufficient to meet these challenges. I want us to act more aggressively and in a more comprehensive way than we have in the past. A few new tweaks of the rules won’t get the job done.”

Threats to NCAA dominion also percolate in Congress. Aggrieved legislators have sponsored numerous bills. Senator Orrin Hatch, citing mistreatment of his Utah Utes, has called witnesses to discuss possible antitrust remedies for the Bowl Championship Series.

Congressional committees have already held hearings critical of the NCAA’s refusal to follow due process in disciplinary matters; other committees have explored a rise in football concussions. Last January, calls went up to investigate “informal” football workouts at the University of Iowa just after the season-ending bowl games—workouts so grueling that 41 of the 56 amateur student-athletes collapsed, and 13 were hospitalized with rhabdomyolysis, a life-threatening kidney condition often caused by excessive exercise.

The greatest threat to the viability of the NCAA may come from its member universities. Many experts believe that the churning instability within college football will drive the next major change. President Obama himself has endorsed the drumbeat cry for a national playoff in college football.

This past spring, the Justice Department questioned the BCS about its adherence to antitrust standards. Jim Delany, the commissioner of the Big Ten, has estimated that a national playoff system could produce three or four times as much money as the existing bowl system does.

If a significant band of football schools were to demonstrate that they could orchestrate a true national playoff, without the NCAA’s assistance, the association would be terrified—and with good reason. Because if the big sports colleges don’t need the NCAA to administer a national playoff in football, then they don’t need it to do so in basketball.

In which case, they could cut out the middleman in March Madness and run the tournament themselves. Which would deprive the NCAA of close to $1 billion a year, more than 95 percent of its revenue. The organization would be reduced to a rule book without money—an organization aspiring to enforce its rules but without the financial authority to enforce anything.

Thus the playoff dreamed of and hankered for by millions of football fans haunts the NCAA. “There will be some kind of playoff in college football, and it will not be run by the NCAA,” says Todd Turner, a former athletic director in four conferences (Big East, ACC, SEC, and Pac-10). “If I’m at the NCAA, I have to worry that the playoff group can get basketball to break away, too.”

This danger helps explain why the NCAA steps gingerly in enforcements against powerful colleges. To alienate member colleges would be to jeopardize its own existence. Long gone are television bans and the “death penalty” sentences (commanding season-long shutdowns of offending teams) once meted out to Kentucky (1952), Southwestern Louisiana (1973), and Southern Methodist University (1987). Institutions receive mostly symbolic slaps nowadays. Real punishments fall heavily on players and on scapegoats like literacy tutors.

A deeper reason explains why, in its predicament, the NCAA has no recourse to any principle or law that can justify amateurism. There is no such thing. Scholars and sportswriters yearn for grand juries to ferret out every forbidden bauble that reaches a college athlete, but the NCAA’s ersatz courts can only masquerade as public authority. How could any statute impose amateur status on college athletes, or on anyone else?

No legal definition of amateur exists, and any attempt to create one in enforceable law would expose its repulsive and unconstitutional nature—a bill of attainder, stripping from college athletes the rights of American citizenship.

For all our queasiness about what would happen if some athletes were to get paid, there is a successful precedent for the professionalization of an amateur sports system: the Olympics. For years, Walter Byers waged war with the NCAA’s older and more powerful nemesis, the Amateur Athletic Union, which since 1894 had overseen U.S. Olympic athletes.

Run in high-handed fashion, the AAU had infamously banned Jesse Owens for life in 1936—weeks after his four heroic gold medals punctured the Nazi claim of Aryan supremacy—because instead of using his sudden fame to tour and make money for the AAU at track meets across Europe, he came home early. In the early 1960s, the fights between the NCAA and the AAU over who should manage Olympic athletes become so bitter that President Kennedy called in General Douglas MacArthur to try to mediate a truce before the Tokyo Olympic Games.

Ultimately, Byers prevailed and effectively neutered the AAU. In November 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed the bipartisan Amateur Sports Act. Amateurism in the Olympics soon dissolved—and the world did not end. Athletes, granted a 20 percent voting stake on every Olympic sport’s governing body, tipped balances in the United States and then inexorably around the world.

First in marathon races, then in tennis tournaments, players soon were allowed to accept prize money and keep their Olympic eligibility. Athletes profited from sponsorships and endorsements. The International Olympic Committee expunged the word amateur from its charter in 1986. Olympic officials, who had once disdained the NCAA for offering scholarships in exchange for athletic performance, came to welcome millionaire athletes from every quarter, while the NCAA still refused to let the pro Olympian Michael Phelps swim for his college team at Michigan.

This sweeping shift left the Olympic reputation intact, and perhaps improved. Only hardened romantics mourned the amateur code. “Hey, come on,” said Anne Audain, a track-and-field star who once held the world record for the 5,000 meters. “It’s like losing your virginity. You’re a little misty for awhile, but then you realize, Wow, there’s a whole new world out there!”

Without logic or practicality or fairness to support amateurism, the NCAA’s final retreat is to sentiment. The Knight Commission endorsed its heartfelt cry that to pay college athletes would be “an unacceptable surrender to despair.” Many of the people I spoke with while reporting this article felt the same way. “I don’t want to pay college players,” said Wade Smith, a tough criminal lawyer and former star running back at North Carolina. “I just don’t want to do it. We’d lose something precious.”

“Scholarship athletes are already paid,” declared the Knight Commission members, “in the most meaningful way poss-ible: with a free education.” This evasion by prominent educators severed my last reluctant, emotional tie with imposed amateurism.

I found it worse than self-serving. It echoes masters who once claimed that heavenly salvation would outweigh earthly injustice to slaves. In the era when our college sports first arose, colonial powers were turning the whole world upside down to define their own interests as all-inclusive and benevolent. Just so, the NCAA calls it heinous exploitation to pay college athletes a fair portion of what they earn.

Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

Source:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/8643/
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2011-08-31T20:06:00.004-04:00

A Week on Pravda
Another side of the big story, what you learn when you stop reading and listening to western corporate news. Try it.

Week of August 29, 2011

World revolution: 100,000 in the streets

10.08.2011
Maria Ekatarina

No this is not London. It is Santiago, capital city of Chile, where a demonstration for improvements in education brings together one hundred thousand youths. Hooded groups clashed with police, trade unions attended the march.

Tuesday saw 100,000 Chileans take to the streets of the capital Santiago for a march in defense of public education and quality which were recorded in clashes between groups of masked protesters and police. The demonstration, authorized by the government up to 15 hours (at 16h GMT), left the University of Chile at 10h19 Almagro toward the park. Some protesters threw shredded papers and released balloons, others beat saucepans with sticks.

Sectors joining the act are the Confederation of Copper Workers (CTC), National Grouping Employees Tax (Anef), the United Workers Central (CUT), the National Confederation of Employees of the municipal Health (Confused) and Union inter Construction (Laminate Flooring).

There were no reports of incidents in the first two hours of demonstration, even an isolated group of hooded protesters have caused riots in public and private buildings in a pedestrian city center.

The military police intervened and threw jets of water and tear gas against the group, which also was reprimanded by the central marchers. According to the mayor of Santiago, Pablo Zalaquett, the youth group that would have caused the incident would have about 200 members.

http://english.pravda.ru/hotspots/conflicts/10-08-2011/118695-world_revolution-0/_
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Fake Messages Led to Libya war

19.08.2011
Marinella Correggia

PARIS TWITTER, LIBYA WAR. HOW A FATAL TWITTER MESSAGE OPENS THE DOORS TO A MUCH WANTED WAR AGAINST LIBYA, THROUGH THE GATE OF UNSC RESOLUTIONS 1970 AND 1973.　

The mother of all lies was sent to the world through a Twitter message by Al Arabiya, February 23th. A message which makes Qadafi out to be a Hitler, and even more outrageous and cruel: "the repression in Libya has already claimed 10,000 dead and 50,000 injured."

It may be a ballon d'essai to check if the world was able to swallow it; it did: Even the progressive people in Europe said:

"We must stop the genocide." "Bengazi is like Guernica."

But who is the source of this news? It was the terrorist rebels indeed (who kept repeating it): Al Arabyia says it received the news from "Sayed al Shanuka, Libyan member of the International Criminal Court, who was interviewed from Paris"

http://www.ansamed.info/en/libia/news/ME.XEF93179.html

February 24th, just one day after the "genocide news," the International Criminal Court dismisses that man: "A clarification on media information regarding the ICC position on the Libyan situation is necessary. Various media sources have published information regarding the situation in Libya attributed to Mr Sayed Al Shanuka (or El-Hadi Shallouf), presented as a "member of the International Criminal Court" (ICC).

The ICC wishes to clarify that this person is neither a staff member nor counsel currently practicing before it, and by no means can he speak on behalf of the Court. Any declaration he made is given solely in his personal capacity.

The only official position to date is the ICC Prosecutor's statement, published on 23 February 2011. The decision to seek justice in Libya should be taken by the Libyan people. Currently, the Libyan State is not a Party to the Rome Statute. Therefore, intervention by the ICC on the alleged crimes committed in Libya can occur only if the Libyan authorities accept the jurisdiction of the Court, (through article 12(3) of the Rome Statute).

In the absence of such a step, the United Nations Security Council can decide to refer the situation to the Court. The Office of the Prosecutor will act only after either decision is taken."

www.icc-cpi.int/NR/exeres/8974AA77-8CFD-4148-8FFC-FF3742BB6ECB.htm

But nobody seems to notice this official statement.

A few days later, March 3rd, it is Ali Zeidan's turn, a self-appinted spokesperson from the Libyan League for Human Rights which always, only from Paris, presents more terrifying data: 6,000 victims (3,000 in Tripoli, 2,000 in Benghazi, 1,000 elsewhere). But Zeidan's denunciation is not published in the LLHT website, and by the way Zeidan is not the president nor the director: another fake source. Zeidan is indeed a spokesperson of Benghazi terrorists. And he is the same Zeidan who, on March 23rd, stated: "In future oil agreements, we will remember those who helpd us" (by bombing more!).

It is indeed this data, 10,000 or 6,000 victims in a few days of protests, plus those allegedly "injured by Qadafi," which is taken as gold by the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

(But when in June the chief Prosecutor Ocampo issues a warrant for the three, the figure is no longer 6,000 but 208).

No matter, it is the huge figure which is used as the basis for the UN resolutions and for the war. The assumption is that if, in few days, "Qadafi killed so many people, what will happen if Libyan tanks enter Benghazi?" Indeed Dennis Ross, the White House political advisor, then stated: "Up to 100,000 people could be killed and everybody will blame us if we don't intervene."

This is what the UN resolutions and the war are based on...a twitter from a fake source.

(By the way, even in former wars in the past 20 years, there were fake smoking guns: incubators switched off in Kuwait City by Iraqi soldiers; weapons of mass destruction, mass graves and girls crying in front of a camera that they escaped death or rape)

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/19-08-2011/118803-Fake_Messages_Led_to_Libya_war-0/
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Libya: The massacre, the cover-up. What is going on?

10.08.2011
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

The mainstream western media are curiously silent about Libya. Why could this be? We reveal some shocking facts, telling you where NATO's money is being spent. While community programmes and being cut back in Europe, did our readers know that up to 100.000 USD per aircraft per hour is being wasted massacring children in Libya?

I will tell you why the western "bought" media is quiet about Libya. It is quiet about Libya because NATO is committing more and more massacres of civilians and NATO's darlings, the (mainly foreign) terrorists, are losing to Colonel Gaddafi's forces on the ground. Towards 21.00 GMT on August 9, NATO aircraft committed a massacre of civilians in the village of Majer, near Zliten - 85 people lost their lives, including 33 children, 32 women and 20 men.

The international community looks on, the international media remains sullenly silent. And the truth about what is happening in Libya is shocking NATO to the core. That is precisely why in recent weeks, since the brilliant Libyan victory in the Battle of Al-Brega against NATO's terrorists (it is claimed around 100,000 foreign bearded Islamist fanatics crossed over the frontier from Egypt just before mayhem broke out), a battle in which a smokescreen clouded the skies so that NATO's jets could not (illegally) intervene in an internal conflict to protect the terrorists against Libyan government troops, NATO has been pouring more and more mercenaries into their fight.

It is also why NATO has been strafing civilian structures like the Libyan water supply system, targeting the electricity grid, to "break civilians" and destroying the factory making water pipes, because it is staring defeat in the face despite Cameron and Sarkozy and their sickening clique of cowards having spent hundreds of millions of their taxpayers' dollars on this illegal campaign or murder, wanton destruction and criminal damage.

Cameron even has the audacity to speak out against "criminals" in his own country, when his own forces are committing massacres of civilians, destroying public and private property and slaughtering kids in Libya.

And why exactly is NATO becoming so hysterical? While at home people start to question why their community centres have been closed, why that hospital wing will not be opened, why spending cuts of up to 85% in education and training programmes have left tens of thousands of youths without a future, while NATO spends millions upon millions daily, things are going disastrously wrong on the ground.

Increasingly, more and more foreign mercenaries are captured and increasingly, it becomes obvious that a very large number of the terrorists unleashed by NATO are not even Libyans. And so desperate it is becoming, apparently, that the USA is secretly holding talks with the Libyan Foreign Affairs Ministry (according to an off-the-record statement from a Ministry spokesperson in a very senior position), whereby Tripoli is being told that if it renegotiates contracts worth 45 billion USD it currently holds with the Russian Federation and PR China, then Washington will act accordingly.

Wonderful solidarity from the country whose White House stated in a letter that it is good to involve NATO because it saves the American taxpayer money and saves the lives of US boys. Yes, they actually said that. Mind you, if the French pilots knew what their British colleagues said about them, hahahahaha.

The British authorities are also, apparently, frantically trying to save the enormous contracts they signed in the construction sector, now they see defeat staring them and their terrorist friends square in the face.

According to a documentary by the Serbian analyst Milovan Drecun (1), NATO's bombing campaign has directly and negatively affected the livelihoods of some 3.5 million people in Africa because the construction projects in which 3.5 million foreign workers made their livings, have stopped.

In fact, the latest documentary, Forbidden Truth, by Milovan Drecun, military expert and political analyst, a war correspondent for 30 years, makes spellbinding viewing. He visited the front line in Libya and spoke directly to people who had fled the clutches of NATO's terrorist forces.

It transpires that the massacres and killing were never by Gaddafi's forces, but rather from terrorist elements with links to Al-Qaeda, liberals, counter-revolutionaries, thugs, common criminals, Islamist fanatics and opportunists, whose space is labelled "The Opposition" while the west continues to label the terrorists as "rebels". And NATO's part in this has been massive. Until June 7, NATO flew 11,000 sorties, in which it murdered or injured 4,711 people - at least 856 of these were innocent civilians, 109 were children. At least 523 civilians were seriously injured and 3,332 received minor injuries.

So where is this legal and under which international law? Why does the international community sit back and watch, doing nothing? Why is Africa not considering a renegotiation of all contracts now, excluding the NATO countries taking part in this outrage?

Milovan Drecun also discovered that Muammar al-Qathafi has the support of all the tribes in Libya, the Libyan youth is by and large with him and he controls some 85% of the territory despite the collective best efforts of wanton destruction and murder by NATO countries. Recently, the 2,000 sheikhs and representatives of the tribes held a meeting in which they decided there was to be no partition of Libya, that the west has no right to interfere in the internal affairs of Libya and that Libyans do not have the right to kill each other.

Bottom line: NATO has squandered MILLIONS of dollars which its member states could have used in development projects at home, it has committed massacres, NATO and its terrorist friends are the ones killing civilians, Gaddafi's people are behind him and the terrorists are losing on all fronts.

Now if that isn't a criminal, murderous failure of a policy by NATO, it is difficult to imagine what is.

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/10-08-2011/118711-libya_massacre-0/
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Libya: Prostitution of Western journalism
24.08.2011
Sergey Balmasov

The last two days have once again proved the obvious fact that there are no independent media and that Western news agencies, newspapers and magazines work out a political order. The lion's share of newspapers, magazines and news agencies reported the unprecedented success of the insurgents and predicted the imminent fall of Tripoli.

However, as reported to Pravda.Ru by Libyan Armed Forces captain Hasan D., "Tripoli is still in our hands. When early reports of the assault and landing of the enemy emerged, our leader Muammar Gaddafi arrived wearing his military uniform, and his appearance caused unprecedented enthusiasm among the soldiers and the people. He ordered us to beat the rats and their Western backers. By the morning we partially drove them out of the city, partially destroyed, despite the fact that NATO aircraft are almost constantly hanging in the air, bombing residential neighborhoods. Hospitals are overwhelmed with the wounded. The West is committing a heinous crime, murdering women and children. According to the information received, approximately two thousand civilians were killed. We were able to shot down a helicopter that crashed off the coast. Now the military and militias are killing off the "rats" and foreign fighters on the outskirts of Tripoli.

So what has happened? Some of the foreign newsmen were quick to announce that Gaddafi's security lay down their arms, the rebels already control 80-90 percent of the city and that they are about to take the bunker where the Colonel is hiding, and that the rebels took Breguet.

They also spread information that people took to the streets of the capital to celebrate the overthrow of the Libyan colonel. As early as in the morning of August 22 the media began reporting on the detention of Gaddafi's three sons (including Mohammad and Seyifa), as well as the death of Khamis, a commander of the elite brigade. However, none of these prisoners were shown to the public.

Then, the Internet showed the shots of the killed Jamahiriya leaders: Colonel himself, his close associates and relatives, including General Abdullah al-Senussi and Dr Aisha al-Qadhafi. However, very quickly it became clear that this is a lie and there images were fabricated using Photoshop.

For example, the image of the "corpse" of Gaddafi was based on a snapshot of the murdered Secretary of bin Laden, and the "remains" of Aisha materialized on the basis of the photographs of Benazir Bhutto deceased in the terrorist attack.

By the evening it became clear that the insurgents and foreign promoters were running into difficulties. First, the success of Gaddafi opponents stopped at seizing 80-90 percent of Tripoli, and channels like "Al-Jazeera" were broadcasting information about "fierce resistance" of the Colonel's security that "miraculously" revived.

Later sources have sadly reported that Mohammed fled. Following this, Seyif surrounded by his soldiers appeared in front of the audience and angrily denounced NATO and the rebels, calling on the Libyan people "to destroy the rats." Then Khamis appeared, whose arrival decisively changed the situation with the defense of the city.

Contradictory information came from Breguet. Western propagandists have reported that Mutassima group came from there to help Gaddafi that the city has surrendered. This information was immediately followed by the reports that, in fact, negated the former. According to the number of media outlets, the battle of Breguet went on. The latter seems to be true, because even if they wanted to, they would not be able to overcome a thousand miles to Tripoli with the opposition of NATO hanging in the air.

By the morning of August 23, even the Western media began to report that the progress of the rebels has stalled. This was accompanied by the speech of Muammar Gaddafi son's Seyifa, in which he urged journalists to visit all areas of Tripoli and see that everything is quiet in the capital and that the "rats are beaten", as people continue to hunt down those who escaped during the assault.

But what about the television broadcast of "the popular rejoicing" in the streets of Tripoli? Western journalists are encouraged to broadcast "from the field" showing how people who got rid of the tyrant are rejoicing and sending text messages and videos on the Internet. This could not but confuse some knowledgeable people. First, the Internet access has been an issue in Tripoli since February. Second, the coverage of the "places of events" was filmed against a background filled with electric light areas, while due to damage by bombing power supply in most areas of Tripoli was lacking.

Later, some bloggers have compared the photo from the "places of events" with the photographs of the town and found a strange discrepancy with the well-known paintings of the urban landscape. The urban landscapes are missing very important details such as lanterns light, bas-reliefs on the buildings, trees, etc.

A week ago, Qatari authorities were preparing decorations strikingly similar to the scenes of Tripoli. The meaning of these preparations remained unclear, although it was mentioned that it was necessary to train those who will storm the Libyan capital. With a high probability we can assume that the scene "of capturing the dictator's lair" was filmed in the Qatari "theater."

The question arises: why do we need this circus? First, in order to break the faithful and inspire the troops of the rebels. Second, the scenes with the "democrats" who rushed into the Libyan capital were to be a signal of NATO to help them disembark the marines.

In any case, the incident cast another shadow on the foreign journalism. Can one trust such media? In the West journalism has long been considered "the second oldest" profession. But is this comparison true? At the very least, a client that communicates with representatives of the first oldest profession can at least hope for some fun.

http://english.pravda.ru/world/asia/24-08-2011/118842-western_journalism-0/
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NATO is in big trouble
24.08.2011
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Resolutions 1970 and 1973 (2011) of the UN Security Council were very clear in their terms: No foreign military personnel, no mercenaries, no weapons to the parties in conflict and inspection of vessels ferrying arms and soldiers. NATO has breached all four counts and now is liable for prosecution under international law.

Resolutions 1970 and 1973 (2011) of the UN Security Council stated very clearly and categorically that there were to be no foreign troops on the ground in Libya, there were to be no mercenaries, neither were foreign powers to arm the parties to the conflict, as well as imposing the obligation on parties surrounding this to investigate vessels shipping in personnel or arms. NATO has not only failed on all four counts, it has categorically breached them all. NATO is guilty of breaching international law, and there will be consequences.

Quite apart from its obvious breaches of international law, NATO is liable for war crimes - strafing civilian structures such as the water supply system, to "break the population", strafing civilian structures with military hardware, murdering civilians in their homes by precision-bombing children, strafing civilians using Apache helicopters from the USA (isn't there a law in the US about that?).

The more this conflict goes on, the more sinister NATO becomes and the more those of us who knew Colonel Gaddafi's projects and thanked him for his wonderful humanitarian policies (which irritated practically all the players in the western lobbies) are convinced that we have been right from day one, whatever the outcome. This is backed up by today's message from Muammar al-Qathafi, Leader of the Green Committees Movement, in his address to the World Green Committees, in which he called on his supporters to stand firm, encouraged those who said they were depressed, exhorted people not to use violence if possible.

For those who accuse Colonel Gaddafi of terrorism, then let each and every one suffer the crimes that the Black and Tans did to innocent civilians in Ireland, and then come here look me in the face and speak of terrorism. For those who accuse Colonel Gaddafi of terrorism, show me one shred of tangible evidence.

Colonel Gaddafi spread knowledge, not fear. He spread e-learning programmes, he spread telemedicine programmes across Africa while others, from the countries NATO represents left what legacy? 500 years of slavery, of colonialism and pillaging and raping Africa of its resources.

Colonel Gaddafi, as I write, is not finished. He can and would, if given a chance, spread these social and developmental programmes further, if NATO was not so intent on killing him and destroying his country.

The world is at a crossroads. Today, August 2011, we are facing a monumental battle between the forces of evil against an innocent man and an innocent and heroic population. The world is watching Goliath trying to devour David, who fights back heroically against NATO and its Satanic forces of evil who are racists, who have decapitated people in the streets, murdered children (like NATO) raped women and looted.

There is fresh evidence that foreign mercenaries are being deployed by NATO - British, French, Qatari and UAE military personnel have been captured; the Libyan Armed Forces allowed the British to come and collect their dead and wounded as they fled screaming, while the Royal Air Force would have strafed them.

And a clear sign that NATO represents evil is the sinister new practice of deleting facebook accounts of independent journalists, the alleged threats by CNN staff against numerous independent journalists in Tripoli (under investigation) and the media blackout from Libya. However it is not sufficient. We have other ways and means besides Facebook.

There are other social networks. We have other means besides channels like SKY, CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera. There is an international movement to boycott them. There are also commercial consequences: a pan-African movement is being implemented to lock NATO countries out of Africa. You murdered Libyan kids? No place in Africa, no contract. Go steal your own resources, not ours.

And a new international community is being formed by the people of the world, who are flocking towards the Jamahiriya system of government (Read The Green Book *).

It is difficult to know what NATO wanted out of this. It was not peace, for they refused to negotiate. It was not democracy, for they refused to heed the call for elections. Could it then have been simply and only to steal a sovereign country's resources by murdering its people?

Now what, ladies and gentleman, will posterity say to that? Messrs. Cameron, Obama and Sarkozy, and that sickening clique of cowards in NATO, you are in deep, deep trouble. And by God, are you going to pay for what you have done...

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/24-08-2011/118852-nato_trouble-0/
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Battle of Tripoli: Separating Fantasy from Facts

24.08.2011

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

What is going on in Tripoli seems to depend on who you talk to and the more you try to discover that is happening, the more it appears that there are two Tripolis - the one in Libya and another one stashed away somewhere in cyber space, on a pink cloud bathed by television blackouts, NATO cyber terrorist activities and clear breaches on the UNSC Resolutions.

1. NATO violation of international law

I have received numerous reports - being checked - of NATO special forces on the ground in Tripoli trying to aid the terrorist forces they control. This is a clear violation on UNSC Resolutions 1970 and 1973 (2011) and occasions a breach of international law in this case allegedly by France and the UK.

What are these forces doing becoming involved in an internal conflict? What is Cameron doing supporting armed Islamist terrorists, who perpetrated the most horrific outrages upon entering Tripoli, far worse than the thugs at home in the UK? So at home he condemns these acts of violence while he supports Al-Qaeda elements abroad? David Cameron spends 32 million pounds a week supporting people who kidnap and rape women, rape girls, impale small boys with stakes and carry out massive looting?

Comment: If there are no NATO boots on the ground, then suppose if one were caught and beheaded? Surely then there could be no condemnation because if there are no boots on the ground, then he does not exist. You cannot behead a ghost. Would Cameron complain if someone did to his family what his forces did to Colonel Gaddafi's grandchildren? Would Cameron come forward and admit what the Bullingdon Club did and his membership of it? The same or worse than the rioters he condemned? And did the MPs in the UK not acquire the same plasma TV screens using the taxpayers' money, while he condemned a few kids for looting? What right has someone like this to opine on anything, especially embroil his country in a tribal war of the most horrific proportions, which is what he seems to have unleashed in Libya?

2. Khamis the ghost, Saif the prisoner

So much for the credibility of the western media, to which David Cameron answered when he was reported speaking on the arrest of three of Colonel Gaddafi's sons. One thing is to jump to conclusions and copy and paste what is on Twitter, or on other websites, which it seems is what the western media is doing.

I have removed SKY, BBC, Al-Jazeera and CNN from my cable TV package here in Bucharest. I shall never, ever watch them again. For those of us outside Libya is it impossible to sit here and write with certainty what is the truth. What I can say is that I have sources inside Libya that say they are in Green Square right now, that say they are in Bab Azizia right now, and that the flags there are Green and not the terrorist flags. The terrorists number only a few thousand, apparently and are being split from their NATO masters.

Whether or not this is the case, time will tell. Yet for now it does present itself as a plausible alternative source of news.

And what was this about Saif al-Islam al-Qathafi being held prisoner then turning up smiling? And what about the murder of Khamis, twice? And here he is in Tripoli? So if the sources I am using here are credible or not, how credible are the lies by SKY and friends?

3. Did NATO send the terrorists to their deaths?

There are reports that huge numbers of terrorists were cleansed from the streets of Tripoli after storming into the city. Quite how far they got is open to argument. The conflicting stories give some credence to the theory that NATO hacked into the Libyan TV and communications channels on Sunday night, showed the images of marauding gangs of terrorists cheering while the real ones ran amok in some suburbs only, creating a generalised impression that Tripoli had fallen.

4. Today's prisoners of war taken by the Libyan Armed Forces

750 Benghazi terrorists , 3 Qatari, 10 French, 1 English, 14 Emirates, 2 Algerian, 45 Egyptian, 5 Greek, 2 Italian.

This data is being checked. The foreigners from NATO countries would be further proof of breach of the UNSC resolutions covering this conflict. Of course if they do not exist then what happens to them cannot be condemned. How many families in F-UK-US (France, UK, USA) have been informed that their loved ones are missing in action?

5. Exact battle information

I am not going to divulge the exact battle information I have received because it may be inaccurate and may occasion the death of people. What I can say is that the systematic attempts to blackout news from inside Libya by taking out the TV are giving rise to numerous stories, some of which if believable would mean that this is far from over.

6. A sense of humanity

It is quite evident that NATO made a huge mistake in inventing lies and supporting terrorist elements, misguiding who otherwise would have been young men with a future and sending tens of thousands of them to their deaths fighting against the Libyan authorities which from day 1 have been protecting civilians against this scourge, a lot of it from foreign countries.

It is clear that NATO broke every rule in the book once again and proved itself to be a criminal organization pandering to the needs of the lobbies it serves. We see its politicians are no more than a sham, and western democracy is a fraud.

It is also clear that the people of the world hate NATO with a seething loathing. As we have all taken sides in this, many of us supporting Muammar al-Qathafi against a bunch of murderers who never once mentioned his humanitarian projects (because they want to stop them and steal African's resources), we should also remember our humanity.

We must not gloat over the deaths of human beings, we must not wish for the wholesale slaughter of the terrorists but appeal instead for humanity from both sides. We should once again use all our powers to bring the international community to allow the Libyan Government to broker a ceasefire and hold talks, something it has been trying to do from the beginning, and hold elections as it promised from the beginning.

It was NATO that refused. Now THAT may go a long way to describing the events of the last few days. Time will tell. All we can do from outside is to make a responsible attempt to find news from the front lines and report it. There are two sides to this story. How far the truth tends to lie on either side of the line I have no way of telling, but I do refuse to sit here copying and pasting from sources which just reiterate the nonsense peddled by the other channels. Things can change within hours but at this moment I believe what I have here to be true.

What I can do is to condemn those who threatened the independent journalist Lizzie Phelan. I will find out who you are and I will name you and shame you in public. You do NOT threaten innocent girls trying to make a career. Threaten me, and see what happens.

http://english.pravda.ru/world/africa/24-08-2011/118841-tripoli_truth-0/
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Tripoli: Media blackout, why?

28.08.2011

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

The NATO approach to freedom of expression is threatening independent journalists, closing social network accounts, blocking Twitter and hacking into websites. For some reason it must be. Despite these Fascist policies, those who have felt millions of people gathering around us, desperate for information, have a duty to say what is going on.

For all of those who have been contacting me daily, asking for new information, desperate to hear some news in the midst of NATO's media blackout and lies about how the "Gaddafy regime collapsed", in first place, God Bless you and in second place, indeed you represent the hearts and minds of the international community. Of that I have no doubt. From Manila to Moscow, Russia, where according to a recent poll 91% of the population supports Muammar al-Qathafi, from Sydney to Strasbourg, from Brasilia to Bangkok.

For all these good people, who respect international law and who abhor NATO's act of butchery followed by thieving of a sovereign nation's resources, even before the fight is over, who abhor NATO's supporting of Al-Qaeda elements and backing of racist thugs who slaughtered Negroes in the streets, here is what I have.

It is impossible for me to sit at my keyboard outside Libya and declare that I am the guardian of the truth. Indeed, I have very rarely written anything other than opinion-editorial pieces on Libya because I do not have my eyes on the ground. The eyes on the ground I have used are independent journalists, who have now been silenced, and eye witnesses inside Libya.

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/28-08-2011/118880-tripoli_media-0/
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Next stop: Syria
29.08.2011

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

The forces of evil have been unleashed, a tsunami of Satanic hordes representing the corporate elitists which dictate western policies, a clique which hides behind the politicians it manipulates, for whom the media lies and for whom NATO arms terrorists and commits war crimes if necessary. Next stop, Syria. Guess who is at the end of the line?

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was caught grinning and sniggering during the address of Muammar al-Qathafi to the Arab League in Damascus in 2008, when he predicted, not three years before Washington unleashed its Satanic Forces against his Jamahiriya, that Libya or Syria could be next. Bashar Al-Assad will be grinning from the other side of his face now, the difference being that there is an international Jamahiriya movement to continue the Colonel's work, while Assad's legacy is precisely what?

Now, surprise, surprise... the Syrian Transitional National Council has been formed in exile with 94 members, a President and three Vice-Presidents. The Chair will be occupied by Paris-based exile Burhan Ghalioun. The Vice Presidents are Faruq Tayfur, Wajdi and Mustafa Riad Seif. This move was announced this morning by the Syrian Opposition meeting in Ankara, Turkey.

Next stop, Syria. That is the smaller story and what happens next we can predict. The wider picture is also not difficult to see. One only needs to call up a map of the Islamic Republic of Iran and then place a US flag in all the countries around it, where the USA has bases. In plain terms, Iran is surrounded.

It is evident that this latest push from the corporate elitists to garner control of the world's energy resources will not stop here, for like a serial sex offender, they will not be able to hold back the momentum of their own corporate greed. The question is, to what extent will it be successful, and will the rule of law win the day against the law of the jungle?

For a start, while the conflict is still ongoing in Libya (which produces the most varied myriad of reports daily), it is clear that a determined and courageous army (the Libyan Armed Forces and the heroic people of Libya) managed to withstand the most barbaric bombing campaign unleashed since the Second World War, against a defenceless civilian population to aid terrorists to take control of the country. In the end, the deadlock was only moved after NATO had broken each and every one of the rules of engagement and the international laws covering this conflict, rendering it diplomatically and politically far weaker in the future. Who will ever trust NATO again in the UNSC?

Quite where these terrorists stop is another question, since the Islamist element west of Sinai is now far stronger than it was and the forces of Al-Qaeda are active in Libya as they will be in Syria, where chemical weapons abound.

Ironically, it was precisely the man who stood against Al-Qaeda that NATO wants to remove - Colonel Gaddafi - and in so doing, should it be successful, while this will be the first step towards destroying his African Union and substituting it with the re-colonization of Africa via AFRICOM, is has unleashed forces which it will not control.

Israel meanwhile must have its ears pressed well back on its head and its nose very close to the ground as it sees the bedlam unleashed around it. Perhaps Libya has taught us all a lesson: NATO is not so high and mighty (it plays its soccer match by putting more and more players on the field and by bribing the referee team, while then resorting to shooting its opponents in their feet) and a proper answer to its schemes in future UNSC meetings should be enough to hold it back. No more goodwill.

Meanwhile, the advice to Syria and Iran is, arm yourself to the teeth with air defence systems because a coward does not fight when it does not have total air superiority.

http://english.pravda.ru/world/asia/29-08-2011/118896-next_syria-0/
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2011-08-24T20:13:00.000-04:00

Top Romney adviser campaigned for Marxist Islamic terrorist group

By Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story
August 23rd, 2011

One of former Mass. Governor Mitt Romney's (R) top foreign policy advisers became the subject of a report by Salon on Tuesday for his links to a group of Iranian terrorists who were responsible for killing Iranian civilians and U.S. citizens during the 1970s.

Known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization, or just MEK, the group is described by the U.S. State Department as a cult-like sect formed in the 1960s to combat western influence, driven by a mixture of Marxism and Islam. It is also the largest armed resistance group opposed to the current Iranian regime.

That's where Mitchell Reiss comes in. As the former policy planner director for the State Department during President George W. Bush's administration, and in his current role as the president of Washington College, Reiss has aided that campaign, likely in a paid capacity, giving speeches to advocate for a renewed status as a non-terrorist entity. He's also Romney's top foreign policy adviser.

The MEK claims to have renounced terrorism since 2001, and has embarked on a campaign to rehabilitate their image in western eyes. It regularly pays influential individuals tens of thousands of dollars for brief speaking engagements, and a number of high profile political figures have come out in support of the group, including former Vermont Governor Howard Dean (D). It is not clear where their funding comes from.

Although the last two administrations did not see reason to remove the MEK's terrorist status, there's an ongoing review behind the scenes at the State Department, which was ordered by the courts.

That could be used as a point to joust with Romney's campaign given that Republicans so doggedly hammered President Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign for allegedly "palling around with terrorists," over his connection to William Ayers.

Reiss speaks in favor of the MEK in the video below.
The video below is from a July 17, 2011 symposium held in Washington, D.C.

Source:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/08/23/top-romney-adviser-campaigned-for-marxist-islamic-terrorist-group/
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2011-08-22T10:29:00.003-04:00

The Unacceptables

by William Rivers Pitt
Truthout
August 20, 2011

"All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure." -- Mark Twain

And so begins again the Herculean task of wrapping my poor, abused mind around yet another crop of Faustian caricatures lined up to scrap and scrape for the Republican presidential nomination.

They seem to get worse every year, but this time around, there are definitely a lot more bananas in the bunch.

Let's see. We have Newt Gingrich, who pointedly continues to declare that he remains a viable candidate, despite having blown four tires and an engine immediately after leaving the starting line.

We have Rick Santorum, whose name, when Googled, is given a whole new definition that appears at the top of the search engine list (presumably despite the best efforts of Mr. Santorum's campaign and supporters).

There is Ron Paul, whose much-ballyhooed libertarianism fails to encompass his desire to give the Federal government whole and complete control of a woman's reproductive process.

There is Jon Huntsman, who seems like a fairly balanced guy (he has openly declared his belief in evolution and global warming), which means he is utterly doomed in the GOP primary chase.

There's Herman Cain, Gary Johnson, Thaddeus McCotter, and Buddy Roemer, too...and if you said "Who?" to any or all of those names, you're far from alone.

According to the "mainstream" news media, however, there are only three Republican presidential candidates worth paying attention to. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has already been running for something like thirty weeks, not that you'd know it from his deliberately stealthy campaign. Romney, of course, ran for the nomination in 2008, but was undone by Mike Huckabee, who stayed in long enough to keep Romney from collecting enough GOP base votes to survive. John McCain essentially won the nomination by default in the aftermath of Romney's collapse, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) has been in the race since late June, having declared her candidacy early this summer (with no small amount of historical irony) in Waterloo, Iowa. Bachmann is a Tea Party darling who has, at various times, blamed Presidents Carter and Obama for the outbreak of swine flu, claimed that carbon dioxide is not harmful to your health, stated that the elimination of the minimum wage would be a cure-all for unemployment, and sincerely believes that gay people are looking to take over the country so as to crash the planet into the sun.

The most recent entrant into the 2012 Republican field is Texas governor Rick Perry, who jumped into the fray howling like a werewolf in the rut. He began by accusing the Fed chairman Ben Bernanke of treason, followed up by questioning President Obama's love of country, and concluded his trifecta of crazy with the claim that environmental scientists who warn of global warming are only in it for the money.

Perry was first brought to national attention when he made it known that the state of Texas might secede from the union after Obama's election, and once tried to end a drought with a statewide prayer drive.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your 2012 Republican presidential field.

Feel better? I don't.

Granted, the freak-show reality of the GOP's Big Three - Romney, Bachmann and Perry, oh my! - is sure to deliver a great deal in the way of entertainment value. When Perry ripped off his "treason" remark about Bernanke, about thirteen dozen former Bush officials came down on him like a ton of bricks, exposing for a national audience what is already widely known in Texas: Bush and Perry do not like each other.

This dynamic promises to expose any number of rifts within the Republican Party, as Mr. Bush remains at the right hand of God in the minds of many GOP base voters. Perry has been learning foreign policy at the knee of such catastrophically failed luminaries as Douglas Fieth and William Luti, presumably the last two people in America who still think invading Iraq was a good idea.

Romney, for his part, is believed by many Republican voters to have no principles worth mentioning. Exhibit A will be the fact that he is running as fast as he can from his own health care reform plan for Massachusetts, adopted to no small degree by Mr. Obama for his own health care reform legislation. Add to that the fact of Romney's Mormon faith, which many GOP evangelical base voters consider to be a cult, and what he has before him is a very long row to hoe.

Michele Bachmann is...well...simply insane on any number of levels, and so she will certainly give us all fits before the curtain comes down on this sorry show. She barely has a voting record to speak of, and is only in the race because Tea Party voters like her style.

If she stays in long enough, she could wind up playing the evangelical spoiler role (a la Huckabee in '08), thus upending the whole show and delivering the GOP nomination to one of the also-rans who linger at the back of the pack.

The comedic aspect of this fool's gallery is far beside the point. Not one of these individuals should ever be allowed anywhere near the kind of power one is given upon assuming the office of President of the United States...and yet the "mainstream" news media has been propping these three up as legitimate, thoroughly normal candidates for the highest office in the land.

It is a testament to how utterly deranged our political culture has become that any of these people would even be considered an appropriate candidate for dog-catcher, and yet we will spend the next fifteen months being spoon-fed the idea that these three are perfectly appropriate potential nominees, and not a pack of deranged fanatics who couldn't govern their way out of a wet paper sack.

Who knows, though. Some heretofore unannounced challenger could parachute into the race and change the whole dynamic. People have been muttering the name Jeb Bush as a potential candidate, which would be interesting; I think it might be easier to run for president with a dead koala bear tied around my neck than it would be to run with the name "Bush." Sarah Palin could make a late entry, thus answering all of my most earnestly delivered prayers.

These people frighten me for a variety of reasons, but what frightens me most of all is the fact that, almost certainly, one of them will be the Republican nominee for President...and the "mainstream" media will tell us how perfectly normal that is.

Pssst...it isn't. These people are uniformly terrible, no matter what the TV says. Pass it on.

About authorWilliam Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence. His newest book, House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation, will be available this winter from PoliPointPress.

Source:
http://www.truth-out.org/unacceptables/1313703982
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2011-08-11T22:05:00.000-04:00

Freedom and privacy, R.I.P.

By Mark Gibbs
Network World
Backspin
August 08, 2011

Freedom and privacy, in any meaningful sense, are dead. I know, I know ... I've written about this topic before but that was in the context of our "factual" privacy, which is about access to what you might think of as "static" data about you. Now we have to recognize the death of our "realtime" or "lifestream" privacy: the freedom to go about our business unobserved and anonymously.

Factual privacy is different from lifestream privacy. The former is about access to facts such as the color of your hair and eyes, your ethnicity, your height and weight, your income, your cholesterol level and so on. Those are all data points that create a snapshot of you.

Almost 10 years ago I wrote a Backspin column titled "The Paperwork of Freedom" in which I discussed my knee surgery and the endless medical forms I had to fill in over and over again.

My point was that, while digitizing medical records may be the way of the future, the sheer messiness of paperwork ensures it's a lot harder for your "factual" privacy to be breached. Unfortunately we now know that all of our factual data, not just the medical stuff, is becoming digital whether we like it or not.

On the other hand, lifestream privacy involves behavioral data such as where you go and when, what you look at, and even how you respond; it's more like a movie of you. Taken to its extreme it also includes who you talk to, telephone and email with, and even what you talk about.

A lack of lifestream privacy makes it possible, at the least, for businesses to manipulate you. For example, consider online shops that track and test your behavior.

These stores "watch" where you linger, note what you look at, monitor for indications of interest, and then conclude, for example, from the shirts and pants you've looked at, that you like a particular shade of yellow and that you're looking for casual clothing. As a result, when you visit the shoe department, the shop makes sure you see the yellow tennis shoes first.

How does that make you feel? In that scenario you would have factual privacy (at least, until you enter your credit card at checkout), so you would be effectively anonymous, but all the same you would have been measured and manipulated, possibly over multiple visits.

While you might look at this as a good thing (your desires and interests are being addressed far more efficiently), you also need to recognize that the shop will use the intelligence it's gained about your preferences to manipulate you, at the very least to "up-sell" you related products such as, for example, socks in colors they determine might appeal to you.

Similar tracking techniques are now in use in the real world, and the connection of your factual data to your lifestream data on- and offline is what many businesses are trying to do ... until they get caught, which is something we'll discuss next week.

Thomas Jefferson has often been quoted as saying, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." Alas, you can be as vigilant as you please and still have to stand by and watch your freedom being chipped away, a piece at a time, until there's nothing left. Which, it could be argued, is where we already are. Freedom and privacy, rest in pieces.

All contents copyright 1995-2011 Network World, Inc.

This story appeared on Network World at:
http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2011/080811-backspin.html
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2011-08-08T22:45:00.000-04:00

London riots: gangs use smartphones designed for business executives to organize looting

By Tom Pettifor and Laurie Hanna
Daily Mirror
August 8, 2011

The riots are being orchestrated by teenage gang members using BlackBerry smart phones.

They use the phone’s private messaging service – known as BBM – because police can’t monitor it, unlike normal text messages and social networking sites Twitter and Facebook.

The BBMs connect users via their private Pin numbers. It was designed for business users and is ultra-secure.

One message yesterday urged rioters to link up at Lewisham DLR station. It said: “Bring your cars, vans, hammers the lot!!!”

BBM is increasingly used by gangs because it allows owners to communicate with each other instantly, free and in private. Conversations can also be held between multiple gang members simultaneously in “group chat” sessions.

They were being used yesterday in an attempt to organise disturbances in at least six boroughs across London.

Mark Duggan, whose shooting on Thursday sparked the riots, used BBMs to send his last message to his girlfriend. He wrote: “The Feds are following me.” Duggan was allegedly a member of the Star Gang in Tottenham and they spread the news of his death by BBMs.

Bosses at Canadian company Research In Motion, which owns BlackBerry, yesterday said they would do everything they could to help the police tackle the ringleaders.

Meanwhile, a Met police chief said Twitter users were being investigated for inciting violence online. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Kavanagh said some messages posted on Twitter had been “really inflammatory”.

When asked whether officers would consider arresting tweeters he said “absolutely”.

Mr Kavanagh added: “That investigation is already under way and that is exactly the sort of thing we are looking at.”

Source:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/08/09/london-riots-gangs-use-smartphones-designed-for-business-executives-to-organise-looting-115875-23330401/
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Will RIM help British police ID BlackBerry users who rioted, looted?
BlackBerry UK tweets it will assist authorities 'in any way we can'

By Chris Nerney
IT World
August 08, 2011

Well, this could pretty much rule out a marketing campaign touting BlackBerry as the smartphone of choice for rioters. Which is too bad, because Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) could use a new demographic stronghold to reverse its dwindling market share.

Media reports since the weekend's rioting in sections of London following the shooting death of a local man by police have focused on the roles Twitter and BlackBerry's IM service played in stoking the mayhem.

Now RIM has officially responded. BlackBerry UK, the "official UK Twitter account" for Canada-based RIM, early Monday tweeted:

We feel for those impacted by the riots in London. We have engaged with the authorities to assist in any way we can.

So how can RIM help the police identify riot and looting participants? According to The Register, "RIM can pass over decrypted versions of BBM chatter."

While it continues to lose share of the overall enterprise and consumer smartphone markets, RIM's BlackBerry is quite popular among U.K. teens. Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, says that 37% of teenagers in the U.K. cite the BlackBerry as their main device for communication, The Register reports.

BlackBerry UK's tweet that it is assisting authorities met with some criticism on Twitter. Among the comments in reply:

"What do you mean by that? Are you going to be passing private messages to the police?"

"Are you handing over data to the police?"

"You didn't need to post this. Fanning the flames for people who believe technology, rather than idiots using it, is to blame."

"So basically UK_BB is snitching...b!tchA$$"

Because, as you know, "snitching" is always a greater crime than rioting, looting, shooting, scamming, robbing, etc. At least according to the rioters, looters, shooters, scammers and robbers, who, if anything, are all about honor!

Source:
http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/191381/will-rim-help-british-police-id-blackberry-users-who-rioted-looted
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2011-08-06T20:45:00.002-04:00

Mainstream Media Ignores S&P Attack On Republicans

"United States of America Long-Term Rating Lowered To 'AA+' On Political Risks And Rising Debt Burden; Outlook Negative" - S&P Research Update Title

by Thom Hartmann
ThomHartmann.com
Op-Ed
August 6, 2011

Have you seen, anywhere, in any media, or even heard reported or repeated on NPR, the following sentence?

“We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.”

It’s right there on Page 4 of the official Standard & Poors “Research Update” – the actual report on what they did and why – published on August 5th as the explanation for why they believe Congress – and even the Gang of Twelve – will be unable to actually deal with the US debt crisis.

Perhaps it’s just lazy – the bullet points at the beginning of the report don’t mention the Republicans or taxes, but instead just say, for example (part of one of six quick bullet-points):

“[T]he downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges…”

In order to figure out that one of the reasons why is that “Republicans in the Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues,” a hard-working reporter would have to read to page four of the eight-page report. It’s just too much effort for most reporters?

Although they do also mention this in the very first sentence of the report:

“We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process.” (Italics mine)

Or could it be that many reporters – and virtually all of the television talking heads – are themselves relatively high income-earners who don’t relish the idea of higher taxes?

Or could it be that reporters are afraid that if they report the actual language of the S&P Research Report, then Republicans will punish them by denying them “access” – i.e. refusing to show up on their programs – which is the career and show kiss-of-death for radio and TV programs that rely on big-name politicians to work?

I don’t know the reason, but it’s fascinating to see all the huffing and puffing about the S&P downgrade of America’s debt that all seems to be working so hard to avoid mentioning that critical sentence.

Inquiring minds want to know…

http://www.thomhartmann.com
Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. more...)
Source:
http://www.truth-out.org/mainstream-media-ignores-sp-attack-republicans/1312651460
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2011-08-01T19:50:00.002-04:00

Phone hacking: News International mass-deleted emails, tech firm says

HCL reveals News International's various requests for deletion but tells MPs it knew of nothing untoward

By Patrick Wintour
Guardian.co.uk
August 1, 2011

The technology firm HCL has told the home affairs select committee it was aware of the deletion of hundreds of thousands of emails at the request of News International between April 2010 and July 2011, but said it did not know of anything untoward behind the requests to delete them.

HCL has sent the letter to the home affairs select committee chairman, Keith Vaz , revealing it had been involved in nine separate episodes of email deletion.

HCL says it is not the company responsible for emails on the News International system that are older than a couple of weeks. It says another unnamed vendor is responsible, but confirms it has co-operated with this vendor in deleting material.

Through a letter from HCL's solicitors Stuart Benson, the firm says: "My client is aware of nothing which appeared abnormal, untoward or inconsistent with its contractual role." It adds: "It is entirely for News International, the police and your committee as to whether there was any other agenda or subtext when issues of deletion arose and that is a matter on which my client cannot comment and something you will no doubt wish to explore direct with News International."

It stressed that since it was not the company that stored News International's data "any suggestion or allegation that it has deleted material held on behalf of News International is without foundation".

HCL identified three sets of email deletions in April 2010, including a deletion of a public folder of a live email system that "was owned by a user who no longer needed the emails".

A further 200,000 emails stuck in an outbox were deleted in May 2010 to restore email functionality. In September 2010 a further pruning of historic emails occurred to help stabilise the email archival system, which had been having "frequent outages" since November 2009.

In January 2011 HCL was asked about its ability to truncate a particular database in the email archival systems. HCL "answered in the negative and suggested assistance from the third party vendor". HCL stated no reason as to why it was unable to assist.

In February 2011, emails were deleted in an older version of email software. Finally, in July 2011 HCL helped delete emails from the live system as relocation errors had occurred during migration from one system to the other.

HCL said it did not have the resources to review every set of deletions.

Separately, a firm of solicitors drawn into the News International phone-hacking scandal is expected to reply shortly to the home affairs select committee as to how it came to write a key letter to the newspaper group that was then used by the company to contend that phone hacking had not been widespread.

The firm, Harbottle and Lewis, is consulting the Metropolitan police before deciding how to reply to requests from the select committee to spell out how it came to write a letter taken to mean that only one reporter was aware of phone hacking at the paper.

The New York Times reported at the weekend that the letter sent by Harbottle and Lewis to the culture, media and sport select committee was redrafted more than once. The firm had been hired to review the email of the tabloid's royal reporter, Clive Goodman, who had pleaded guilty to hacking the mobile phone messages of royal household staff members. The letter said "no reasonable evidence" had been found that senior editors knew about the reporter's "illegal actions".

The home affairs select committee asked:

• "What was the exact remit given to Harbottle and Lewis when it was instructed by News International in 2007?"
• "The contents of emails and information held in the file you mentioned in your letter."
• "What advice was provided from Harbottle and Lewis to News International in 2007 following examination of the emails and information?"
• "Why the evidence you had in 2007 that was later examined by Lord McDonald in 2011 was not acted upon sooner?"

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/01/phone-hacking-news-international-emails
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2011-07-29T20:43:00.002-04:00

Is Your Senator Using The Distraction Of The Debt Ceiling To Support The Feds Secret Interpretation Of Spying Laws?

from the sneaky-sneaky dept
Techdirt
July 29, 2011

We were just reporting on how Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was tap dancing around some specific questions about how much warrantless spying on Americans US federal intelligence agencies do.

Much of that discussion revolved around the controversial FISA Amendments Act (recursively called the FAA) of 2008, which you may recall as the law that both made warrantless wiretapping officially legal (despite the fact that the federal government had been doing it for years under a very questionable legal theory) and granted telecom companies retroactive immunity for having helped the feds get such wiretaps despite the lack of warrants (and, in some cases, nothing more than a post-it note asking for it).

The FAA is set to expire in 2012, but, as we've seen with any law that grants the federal government more power to spy on Americans without oversight, there is no way the folks in power want to give up such things.

Now come reports that, while most of Congress is focused on that whole debt ceiling thing, some have decided this is the perfect cover to quickly and secretly re-up the FAA.

It's been reported that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is likely meeting behind closed doors today in an effort (by some) to re-up the FAA now, before anyone even realizes it's being debated. The last thing they want is pesky civil libertarians to re-start the discussion about the general constitutionality of spying on Americans without a warrant (believing in the 4th Amendment is sooooo old fashioned).

In trying to hunt down more details about what's going on, we found out that Senators Wyden and Udall -- who, as we've been discussing, have been trying to stop the federal government from secretly interpreting these laws in ways that seem contrary to what most believe the laws say -- are trying to add an amendment to this attempt to reauthorize the FAA. It's difficult to see how anyone can, in good conscience, vote against this.

It includes such basic truths as:

In democratic societies, citizens rightly expect that their government will not arbitrarily keep information secret from the public but instead will act with secrecy only in certain limited circumstances.

The amendment specifically says that the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence would need to explain "the problems posed by the reliance of government agencies and departments on interpretations of domestic surveillance authorities that are inconsistent with the understanding of such authorities by the public."

Who could possibly vote against that?

Well, tragically, since this supposed meeting is "closed" (though not classified), the Senators get to hide from view for a while. It's one of those arcane Senate rules that are all too often used to allow Senators to avoid public scrutiny for their actions. While no members of the public or press are allowed in the room, and those in the room cannot tell what anyone else says (or votes) in the room... since it's not classified the Senators who are in the room can absolutely say what they said or did in the room.

The specific votes on this particular amendment will be made public three weeks after the markup occurs, buying anyone voting against it three weeks of cover (and when the votes come out, they can pretend this is "old news"). The amendment itself is not secret or classified. Senators cannot reasonably claim that they can't say how they voted for "national security" reasons (a popular cop out) because their votes are going to be made public. The only reason to not answer the question of how they voted is because they want to avoid scrutiny.

So... if your Senator happens to be on the Senate Intelligence Committee now would be the time to call, email, tweet, fax, carrier pigeon, etc. to ask them whether they voted to let Americans know how the government is secretly interpreting its own laws... or if they voted against your basic fundamental rights to know how the government interprets its own laws.

The list of Senators on the Committee are as follows:

Dianne Feinstein, California (chair)
Saxby Chambliss, Georgia (vice chair)
John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia
Olympia J. Snowe, Maine
Ron Wyden, Oregon
Richard Burr, North Carolina
Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland
James Risch, Idaho
Bill Nelson, Florida
Daniel Coats, Indiana
Kent Conrad, North Dakota
Roy Blunt, Missouri
Mark Udall, Colorado
Marco Rubio, Florida
Mark Warner, Virginia

If any of these Senators represent you, please reach out to them as soon as possible to ask them how they voted on the amendment embedded below, and please report back to us with what you hear. Let's not let certain Senators allow the government to make up its own rules and not tell the American public what those rules are.

Read the text of H.R. 1981 here:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/t2GPO/http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr1981ih/pdf/BILLS-112hr1981ih.pdf

Source:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110728/10111515298/is-your-senator-using-distraction-debt-ceiling-to-support-feds-secret-interpretation-spying-laws.shtml
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Related Article

House Committee passes bill requiring your ISP to spy on every click and keystroke you make online and retain for 12 months

Posted by Cory Doctorow

Friday, Jul 29th at 8:12am

Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee voted 19-10 for H.R. 1981, a data-retention bill that will require your ISP to spy on everything you do online and save records of it for 12 months. California Rep Zoe Lofgren, one of the Democrats who opposed the bill, called it a “data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites.” Here’s commentary from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who’ve got a form for contacting your rep to ask her or him to kill this:

The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have recognized. Requiring Internet companies to redesign and reconfigure their systems to facilitate government surveillance of Americans’ expressive activities is simply un-American. Such a scheme would be as objectionable to our Founders as the requiring of licenses for printing presses or the banning of anonymous pamphlets. Today’s vote is therefore very disappointing, but we are especially thankful to GOP Representatives Sensenbrenner, Issa and Chaffetz, who chose principle over party-line in opposing this dangerous tech mandate. We hope that bipartisan opposition will grow as the bill makes its way to the House floor and more lawmakers are educated about this anti-privacy, anti-free speech, anti-innovation proposal.

Source:
http://boingboing.net/2011/07/29/house-of-reps-passes-bill-requiring-your-isp-to-spy-on-every-click-and-keystroke-you-make-online-and-retain-for-12-months.html
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2011-07-23T15:30:00.001-04:00

Security Grifters Partner-Up on Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Project

by Tom Burghardt
Inteldaily
July 4, 2011

Last week, the White House released its National Strategy for Counterterrorism, a macabre document that places a premium on “public safety” over civil liberties and constitutional rights.

Indeed, “hope and change” huckster Barack Obama had the temerity to assert that the President “bears no greater responsibility than ensuring the safety and security of the American people.”

Pity that others, including CIA “black site” prisoners tortured to death to “keep us safe” (some 100 at last count) aren’t extended the same courtesy as The Washington Post reported last week.

As Secrecy News editor Steven Aftergood correctly points out, the claim that the President “has no greater responsibility than ‘protecting the American people’ is a paternalistic invention that is historically unfounded and potentially damaging to the political heritage of the nation.”

Aftergood avers, “the presidential oath of office that is prescribed by the U.S. Constitution (Art. II, sect. 1) makes it clear that the President’s supreme responsibility is to ‘…preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ There is no mention of public safety. It is the constitutional order that the President is sworn to protect, even if doing so entails risks to the safety and security of the American people.”

But as our former republic slips ever-closer towards corporate dictatorship, Obama’s mendacious twaddle about “protecting the American people,” serves only to obscure, and reinforce, the inescapable fact that it’s a rigged game.

Rest assured, “what happens in Vegas,” Baghdad, Kabul or Manama–from driftnet spying to political-inspired witchhunts to illegal detention–won’t, and hasn’t, “stayed in Vegas.”

Cyber Here, Cyber There, Cyber-Surveillance Everywhere

Last month, researcher Barrett Brown and the OpMetalGear network lifted the lid on a new U.S. Government-sponsored cyber-surveillance project, Romas/COIN, now Odyssey, a multiyear, multimillion dollar enterprise currently run by defense and security giant Northrop Grumman.

With some $10.8 billion in revenue largely derived from contracts with the Defense Department, Northrop Grumman was No. 2 on the Washington Technology 2011 Top 100 List of Prime Federal Contractors.

“For at least two years,” Brown writes, “the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once.”

Information on this shadowy program was derived by scrutinizing hundreds of the more than 70,000 HBGary emails leaked onto the web by the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous.

Brown uncovered evidence that the “top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr–the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients.”

Readers will recall that Barr claimed he could exploit social media to gather information about WikiLeaks supporters in a bid to destroy that organization. Earlier this year, Barr told the Financial Times he had used scraping techniques and had infiltrated WikiLeaks supporter Anonymous, in part by using IRC, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

According to emails subsequently released by Anonymous, it was revealed that the ultra rightist U.S. Chamber of Commerce had hired white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams, and that Hunton attorneys, upon recommendation of an unnamed U.S. Department of Justice official, solicited a set of private security contractors–HBGary, HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico Technologies (collectively known as Team Themis)–and stitched-up a sabotage campaign against WikiLeaks, journalists, labor unions, progressive political groups and Chamber critics.

Amongst the firms who sought to grab the Romas/COIN/Odyssey contract from Northrop when it came up for a “recompete” was TASC, which describes itself as “a renowned provider of advanced systems engineering, integration and decision-support services across the intelligence, defense, homeland security and federal markets.”

According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, TASC’s head of “Cybersecurity Initiatives,” Larry Strang, was formerly a Vice President with Northrop Grumman who led that firm’s Cybersecurity Group and served as Northrop’s NSA Account Manager. Prior to that, Strang, a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel, was Vice President for Operations at the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

Brown relates that emails between TASC executives Al Pisani, John Lovegrow and former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr, provided details that they “were in talks with each other as well as Mantech executive Bob Frisbie on a ‘recompete’ pursuant to ‘counter intelligence’ operations that were already being conducted on behalf of the federal government by another firm, SAIC, with which they hoped to compete for contracts.”

In fact, HBGary Federal and TASC may have been cats-paws for defense giant ManTech International in the race to secure U.S. Government cyber-surveillance contracts. Clocking in at No. 22 on Washington Technology’s ”2011 Top 100 list,” ManTech earned some $1.46 billion in 2010, largely derived from work in “systems engineering and integration, technology and software development, enterprise security architecture, intelligence operations support, critical infrastructure protection and computer forensics.”

The firm’s major customers include the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s geek squad that is busily working to develop software for their Cyber Insider Threat (CINDER) program.

Both HBGary Federal and parent company HBGary, a California-based security firm run by the husband-wife team, Greg Hoglund and Penny Leavy, had been key players for the design of malware, undetectable rootkits and other “full directory exfiltration tools over TCP/IP” for the Defense Department according to documents released by the secret-shredding web site Public Intelligence.

Additional published documents revealed that they and had done so in close collaboration with General Dynamics (Project C and Task Z), which had requested “multiple protocols to be scoped as viable options … for VoIP (Skype) protocol, BitTorrent protocol, video over HTTP (port 80), and HTTPS (port 443)” for unnamed secret state agencies.

According to Brown, it appears that Romas/COIN/Odyssey was also big on social media surveillance, especially when it came to “Foreign Mobile” and “Foreign Web” monitoring. Indeed, documents published by Public Intelligence (scooped-up by the HBGary-Anonymous hack) was a ManTech International-HBGary collaboration describing plans for Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations. The October 2010 presentation described plans that would hand “customers,” presumably state intelligence agencies but also, as revealed by Anonymous, corporate security entities and public relations firms, the means to perform “native language searching” combined with “non-attributable architecture” and a “small footprint” that can be “as widely or narrowly focused as needed.”

ManTech and HBGary promised to provide customers the ability to “Locate/Profile Internet ‘Points of Interest’” on “individuals, companies, ISPs” and “organizations,” and would do so through “detailed network mapping” that will “identify registered networks and registered domains”; “Graphical network representation based on Active Hosts”; “Operating system and network application identification”; “Identification of possible perimeter defenses” through “Technology Research, Intelligence Gap Fill, Counterintelligence Research” and “Customer Public Image Assessment.”

The presentation described the social media monitoring process as one that would “employ highly skilled network professionals (read, ex-spooks and former military intelligence operatives) who will use “Non-attributable Internet access, custom developed toolsets and techniques, Native Language and in-country techniques” that “utilize foreign language search engines, mapping tools” and “iterative researching methodologies” for searching “Websites, picture sites, mapping sites/programs”; “Blogs and social networking sites”; “Forums and Bulletin Boards”; “Network Information: Whois, Trace Route, NetTroll, DNS”; “Archived and cached websites.”

Clients who bought into the ManTech-HBGary “product” were promised “Rapid Non-attributable Open Source Research Results”; “Sourced Research Findings”; “Triage level Analysis”; “Vulnerability Assessment” and “Graphical Network and Social Diagramming” via data mining and extensive link analysis.

Undoubtedly, readers recall this is precisely what the National Security Agency has been doing since the 1990s, if not earlier, through their electronic communications intercept program Echelon, a multibillion Pentagon project that conducted corporate espionage for American multinational firms as researcher Nicky Hager revealed in his 1997 piece for CovertAction Quarterly.

Other firms included in Lovegrove’s email to Barr indicate that the new Romas/COIN/Odyssey “team” was to have included: “TASC (PMO [Project Management Operations], creative services); HBGary (Strategy, planning, PMO); Akamai (infrastructure); Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning); Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics); Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services); Cipher (strategy, planning operations); PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic partners); Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development–long list of strategic partners); Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance–long list of strategic partners). We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers.”

Recall that AT&T is the NSA’s prime telecommunications partner in that agency’s illegal driftnet surveillance program and has been the recipient of “retroactive immunity” under the despicable FISA Amendments Act, a law supported by then-Senator Barack Obama. Also recall that the giant tech firm Apple was recently mired in scandal over reports that their mobile phone platform had, without their owners’ knowledge or consent, speared geolocational data from the iPhone and then stored this information in an Apple-controlled data base accessible to law enforcement through various “lawful interception” schemes.

“Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN,” Brown writes, “the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program’s recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he’d spoken to the ‘CO [contracting officer] for COIN’.” The TASC executive told Barr that “the current procurement approach” was cancelled, citing “changed requirements.”

Apparently the Pentagon, or other unspecified secret state satrapy told the contestants that “an updated RFI [request for information]” will be issued soon. According to a later missive from Lovegrove to Barr, “COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey.” While it is still not entirely clear what Romas/COIN or the Odyssey program would do once deployed, Brown claims that “mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program.”

And given Barr’s monomaniacal obsession with social media surveillance (that worked out well with Anonymous!) the presence of Alterian and SocialEyez on the procurement team may indicate that the secret state is alarmed by the prospect that the “Arab Spring” just might slip from proverbial “safe hands” and threaten Gulf dictatorships and Saudi Arabia with the frightening specter of democratic transformation.

Although the email from TASC executive Chris Clair to John Lovegrow names “Alterion” as a company to contact because of their their “SM2 tool,” in all likelihood this is a typo given the fact that it is the UK-based firm “Alterian” that has developed said SM2 tool, described on their web site as a “business intelligence product that provides visibility into social media and lets you tap into a new kind of data resource; your customers’ direct thoughts and opinions.”

This would be a highly-profitable partnership indeed for enterprising intelligence agencies and opaque corporate partners intent on monitoring political developments across the Middle East.

In fact, a 2010 press release, announced that Alterian had forged a partnership with the Dubai-based firm SocialEyez for “the world’s first social media monitoring service designed for the Arab market.”

We’re informed that SocialEyez, a division of Media Watch Middle East, described as “the leading media monitoring service in the Middle East,” offers services in “television, radio, social media, online news and internet monitoring across most sectors including commercial, government and PR.”

That Barr and his partners were interested in bringing these firms to the Romas/COIN table is not surprising considering that the Alterian/SocialEyez deal promises “to develop and launch an Arabic language interface for Alterian SM2 to make it the world’s first Arab language social media monitoring tool.” Inquiring minds can’t help but wonder which three-lettered American agencies alongside a stable of “corporate and government clients, including leading Blue Chips” might be interested in “maximising their social media monitoring investment”?

Pentagon “Manhunters” in the House

On an even more sinister note, the inclusion of Archimedes Global on the Romas/COIN team should set alarm bells ringing.

Archimedes is a small, privately-held niche security firm headquartered in Tampa, Florida where, surprise, surprise, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) has it’s main headquarters at the MacDill Air Force Base. On their web site, Archimedes describes itself as “a diversified technology company providing energy and information solutions to government and businesses worldwide.” The firm claims that it “delivers solutions” to its clients by “combining deep domain expertise, multi-disciplinary education and training, and technology-enabled innovations.”

While short on information regarding what it actually does, evidence suggests that the firm is chock-a-block with former spooks and Special Forces operators, skilled in the black arts of counterintelligence, various information operations, subversion and, let’s be frank, tasks euphemistically referred to in the grisly trade as “wet work.”

According to The Washington Post, the firm was established in 2005. However, although the Post claims in their “Top Secret America” series that the number of employees and revenue is “unknown,” Dana Priest and William M. Arkin note that Archimedes have five government clients and are have speared contracts relating to “Ground forces operations,” “Human intelligence,” Psychological operations,” and “Specialized military operations.”

Brown relates that Archimedes was slated to provide “Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning” for the proposed Romas/COIN/Odyssey project for an unknown U.S. Government entity.

Based on available evidence however, one can speculate that Archimedes may have been chosen as part of the HBGary Federal/TASC team precisely because of their previous work as private contractors in human intelligence (HUMINT), running spies and infiltrating assets into organizations of interest to the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) throughout the Middle East, Central- and South Asia.

In 2009, Antifascist Calling revealed that one of Archimedes Global’s senior directors, retired Air Force Lt. Colonel George A. Crawford, published a chilling monograph, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organizing for Irregular Warfare, for the highly-influential Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.

JSOU is the “educational component” of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). With a mission that touts its ability to “plan and synchronize operations” against America’s geopolitical adversaries and rivals, JSOU’s Strategic Studies Department “advances SOF strategic influence by its interaction in academic, interagency, and United States military communities.”

Accordingly, Archimedes “information and risk” brief claim they can solve “the most difficult communication and risk problems by seeing over the horizon with a blend of art and science.” And with focus areas that include “strategic communications, media analysis and support, crisis communications, and risk and vulnerability assessment and mitigation,” it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to infer that those well-schooled in the dark art of information operations (INFOOPS) would find a friendly home inside the Romas/COIN contract team.

With some 25-years experience “as a foreign area officer specializing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia,” including a stint “as acting Air and Defense Attaché to Kyrgyzstan,” Crawford brings an interesting skill-set to the table. Crawford writes:

Manhunting–the deliberate concentration of national power to find, influence, capture, or when necessary kill an individual to disrupt a human network–has emerged as a key component of operations to counter irregular warfare adversaries in lieu of traditional state-on-state conflict measures. It has arguably become a primary area of emphasis in countering terrorist and insurgent opponents. (George A. Crawford, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare, JSOU Report 09-7, The JSOU Press, Hurlburt Field, Florida, September 2009, p. 1)

Acknowledged manhunting masters in their own right, the Israeli settler-colonial security apparat have perfected the art of “targeted killing,” when they aren’t dropping banned munitions such as white phosphorus on unarmed, defenseless civilian populations or attacking civilian vessels on the high seas.

Like their Israeli counterparts who come highly recommended as models of restraint, an American manhunting agency will employ similarly subtle, though no less lethal, tactics. Crawford informs us:

When compared with conventional force-on-force warfare, manhunting fundamentally alters the ratio between warfare’s respective firepower, maneuver, and psychological elements. Firepower becomes less significant in terms of mass, while the precision and discretion with which firepower is employed takes on tremendous significance, especially during influence operations. Why drop a bomb when effects operations or a knife might do? (Crawford, op. cit., p. 11, emphasis added)

Alongside actual shooters, “sensitive site exploitation (SSE) teams are critical operational components for Pentagon “manhunters.” We’re told that SSE teams will be assembled and able to respond on-call “in the event of a raid on a suspect site or to conduct independent ‘break-in and search’ operations without leaving evidence of their intrusion.” Such teams must possess “individual skills” such as “physical forensics, computer or electronic exploitation, document exploitation, investigative techniques, biometric collection, interrogation/debriefing and related skills.”

As if to drive home the point that the target of such sinister operations are the American people and world public opinion, Crawford, ever the consummate INFOOPS warrior, views “strategic information operations” as key to this murderous enterprise. Indeed, they “must be delicately woven into planned kinetic operations to increase the probability that a given operation or campaign will achieve its intended effect.”

Personnel skilled at conducting strategic information operations–to include psychological operations, public information, deception, media and computer network operations, and related activities–are important for victory. Despite robust DoD and Intelligence Community capabilities in this area, efforts to establish organizations that focus information operations have not been viewed as a positive development by the public or the media, who perceive government-sponsored information efforts with suspicion. Consequently, these efforts must take place away from public eyes. Strategic information operations may also require the establishment of regional or local offices to ensure dissemination of influence packages and assess their impact. Thus manhunting influence may call for parallel or independent structures at all levels…” (Crawford, op. cit., pp. 27-28, emphasis added)

While we do not as yet have a complete picture of the Romas/COIN/Odyssey project, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn.

“Altogether, then,” Brown writes, “a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms–capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence.”

Although Brown’s initial research concluded that Romas/COIN/Odyssey will operate “in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners,” with a firm like Archimedes on-board, once information has been assembled on individuals described in other contexts as “radicals” or “key extremists,” will they subsequently be made to “disappear” into the hands of “friendly” security services such as those of strategic U.S. partners Bahrain and Saudi Arabia?

We’re reminded that “Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means.”

Indeed, “none of the companies involved,” Brown writes, "have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department’s decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct.”

Brown warns that “a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better ‘situational awareness’ on entire populations” while simultaneously manipulating “the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations.”

Beginning, it should be noted, right here at home…

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano’s Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research,The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

Related:
http://cetechnology.net/tag/hbgary/
http://cetechnology.net/2011/06/22/project-pm-leaks-dirt-on-romascoin-classified-intelligence-mass-surveillance/
http://pastebin.com/9TmeP4Dv

Source:
http://inteldaily.com/2011/07/security-grifters-partner-up-on-sinister-cyber-surveillance-project/
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2011-07-18T21:29:00.000-04:00

Sean Hoare knew how destructive the News of the World could be

The courageous whistleblower who claimed Andy Coulson knew about phone hacking had a powerful motive for speaking out

By Nick Davies
Guardian.co.uk
July 18, 2011

[Video Interview Added]

At a time when the reputation of News of the World journalists is at rock bottom, it needs to be said that the paper's former showbusiness correspondent Sean Hoare, who died on Monday, was a lovely man.

In the saga of the phone-hacking scandal, he distinguished himself by being the first former NoW journalist to come out on the record, telling the New York Times last year that his former friend and editor, Andy Coulson, had actively encouraged him to hack into voicemail.

That took courage. But he had a particularly powerful motive for speaking. He knew how destructive the News of the World could be, not just for the targets of its exposés, but also for the ordinary journalists who worked there, who got caught up in its remorseless drive for headlines.

Explaining why he had spoken out, he told me: "I want to right a wrong, lift the lid on it, the whole culture. I know, we all know, that the hacking and other stuff is endemic. Because there is so much intimidation. In the newsroom, you have people being fired, breaking down in tears, hitting the bottle."

He knew this very well, because he was himself a victim of the News of the World. As a showbusiness reporter, he had lived what he was happy to call a privileged life. But the reality had ruined his physical health: "I was paid to go out and take drugs with rock stars – get drunk with them, take pills with them, take cocaine with them. It was so competitive. You are going to go beyond the call of duty. You are going to do things that no sane man would do. You're in a machine."

While it was happening, he loved it. He came from a working-class background of solid Arsenal supporters, always voted Labour, defined himself specifically as a "clause IV" socialist who still believed in public ownership of the means of production. But, working as a reporter, he suddenly found himself up to his elbows in drugs and delirium.

He rapidly arrived at the Sun's Bizarre column, then run by Coulson. He recalled: "There was a system on the Sun. We broke good stories. I had a good relationship with Andy. He would let me do what I wanted as long as I brought in a story. The brief was, 'I don't give a fuck'."

He was a born reporter. He could always find stories. And, unlike some of his nastier tabloid colleagues, he did not play the bully with his sources. He was naturally a warm, kind man, who could light up a lamp-post with his talk. From Bizarre, he moved to the Sunday People, under Neil Wallis, and then to the News of the World, where Andy Coulson had become deputy editor. And, persistently, he did as he was told and went out on the road with rock stars, befriending them, bingeing with them, pausing only to file his copy.

He made no secret of his massive ingestion of drugs. He told me how he used to start the day with "a rock star's breakfast" – a line of cocaine and a Jack Daniels – usually in the company of a journalist who now occupies a senior position at the Sun. He reckoned he was using three grammes of cocaine a day, spending about £1,000 a week. Plus endless alcohol. Looking back, he could see it had done him enormous damage. But at the time, as he recalled, most of his colleagues were doing it, too.

"Everyone got overconfident. We thought we could do coke, go to Brown's, sit in the Red Room with Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence. Everyone got a bit carried away."

It must have scared the rest of Fleet Street when he started talking – he had bought, sold and snorted cocaine with some of the most powerful names in tabloid journalism. One retains a senior position on the Daily Mirror.

"I last saw him in Little Havana," he recalled, "at three in the morning, on his hands and knees. He had lost his cocaine wrap. I said to him, 'This is not really the behaviour we expect of a senior journalist from a great Labour paper.' He said, 'Have you got any fucking drugs?'"

And the voicemail hacking was all part of the great game. The idea that it was a secret, or the work of some "rogue reporter", had him rocking in his chair: "Everyone was doing it. Everybody got a bit carried away with this power that they had. No one came close to catching us." He would hack messages and delete them so the competition could not hear them, or hack messages and swap them with mates on other papers.

In the end, his body would not take it any more. He said he started to have fits, that his liver was in such a terrible state that a doctor told him he must be dead. And, as his health collapsed, he was sacked by the News of the World – by his old friend Coulson.

When he spoke out about the voicemail hacking, some Conservative MPs were quick to smear him, spreading tales of his drug use as though that meant he was dishonest. He was genuinely offended by the lies being told by News International and always willing to help me and other reporters who were trying to expose the truth. He was equally offended when Scotland Yard's former assistant commissioner, John Yates, assigned officers to interview him, not as a witness but as a suspect. They told him anything he said could be used against him, and, to his credit, he refused to have anything to do with them.

His health never recovered. He liked to say that he had stopped drinking, but he would treat himself to some red wine. He liked to say he didn't smoke any more, but he would stop for a cigarette on his way home. For better and worse, he was a Fleet Street man.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/18/sean-hoare-news-of-the-world
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2011-07-10T08:40:00.002-04:00

How Dracula Hedge Funds Are Sucking Us Dry

What notion of economics or ethics justifies the fact that it would take the average family more than 35,000 years to earn as much as the top hedge fund managers earn in one year?

By Les Leopold
AlterNet
July 9, 2011

The official June unemployment rate is 9.2 percent. The real rate is 18.5 percent (which includes involuntary part-time workers and the unemployed who haven’t looked for jobs in the past 4 weeks.) Nearly 30 million Americans are unemployed and we need more than 21 million jobs to get back to full-employment (defined as 5 percent).

Meanwhile, the top 10 hedge fund elites make on average nearly $1 million an HOUR. We’ll never find the resources to solve the unemployment crisis until we redistribute some of this obscene wealth.

It starts by putting to rest the notion that hedge fund elites are just like any other. They are not. They make more money than everyone else, including our top movie stars and athletes...and they pay lower taxes.

While working on my next book on financial elites, we dredged up a variety of “Top Ten Income Lists” (from sources like Forbes and Equilar) for just about every kind of high-rolling celebrity and CEO imaginable. Here are previews:

Oprah led the pack by hauling in an incredible $290 million in 2010.
U2 at $190 million was the top pop musical group.
Leonardo DiCaprio ($77 million) is the leading Hollywood star.
Tiger Woods ($75 million) remains the highest paid athlete even though he doesn’t play much golf these days.
Half of the highest paid non-financial CEOs are in the entertainment business, led by Phillipe Dauman of Viacom ($84.5 million).
Only six out of the 100 highest income Americans on these lists are women.

You also might find it interesting that the top Wall Street bankers are keeping a low-income profile these days. Maybe it’s an attempt to avoid stricter regulatory curbs on their financial casinos. Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase led the bank/insurance top 10 list with an income of $20 million (which, by the way, is half as much as Glenn Beck’s 2010 income). Lloyd “Doing God’s Work” Blankfein of Goldman Sachs was 10th on the banker list with an income of $14.1 million.

All in all, we’re talking about serious money --- except for the fact that hedge funds make 100 times more than bankers.

Here’s the summary table for the “Top Ten” lists for 2010 -- to put the numbers in perspective, median family income is included.

The Highest Income Celebrities, CEO and Hedge Fund Managers (2010)

The Top Ten	Avg Yearly Income	Number of years for the average American family to earn as much.

Hedge Fund managers	$1,753,000,000	35,217 years
Movie directors/producers	$126,000,000	2,531
Top celebrities all fields	$119,800,000	2,407
Pop musicians	$87,200,000	1,752
Non-financial CEOs	$47,100,000	946
Athletes	$44,600,000	896
Movie stars	$42,600,000	856
Authors	$26,900,000	402
Lawyers	$20,000,000	402
Bank/Insurance CEOs	$16,600,000	333

Median Family Income (2009)	$49,777	1 year

For me, the right-hand column says it all. What notion of economics, fairness or ethics justifies the fact that it would take the average family more than 35,000 years to earn as much as the average hedge fund elite earns in one year? And hedge fund honchos can’t sing, dance, write, direct, or play baseball. Yet, whatever they do dwarfs what such stars make. They also don’t make iPads or social media or cars. Yet they make many times more than CEOs of non-financial corporations. What could those hedge fund moguls possibly do to earn such riches?

In economics, there’s supposed to be a connection between what you earn and the economic value you produce. Otherwise, it’s called an economic “rent” – which is just a polite way of saying it’s an outright rip-off. These guys (and they are all guys) are ripping off our economy, and it's up to us to put a stop to it.

Why am I so sure they're ripping us off? I’ve had the dubious honor of exploring some of their biggest deals, including the "Greatest Trade Ever,” in which hedge funds bet against the housing bubble and won big. It turns out those bets were rigged. Hedge funds brazenly colluded with big investment banks to create securities that were designed to fail, so they could bet against them. So far the SEC has forced Goldman Sachs to pay $500 million in penalties and JP Morgan recently coughed up $153.6 million. This was to settle charges that these banks failed to inform investors that hedge funds had a heavy hand in constructing securities so that they would fail.

In fact, we can now show that hedge funds helped to prolong the housing bubble, deepen the crash and profit along the way. No matter what their apologists say, those hedge fund profits came from trash securities that never should have seen the light of day. Not only didn’t they create positive value for the economy, they created billions of losses that led to bailouts, unemployment and massive public debt. Whether any of them engaged in outright fraud, we leave to the courts. It doesn’t matter. It was a monumental economic rip-off, whether legal or illegal.

To add enormous insult to our grievous injuries, these hedge funds managers only pay a 15 percent federal income tax rate (instead of 35 percent) on nearly all of their obscene incomes. That’s because of a tax loophole that allows them to declare their income as capital gains -- they call it “carried interest.” The Obama administration and many in Congress claim they will do away with this loophole. Hedge fund groupies say it won’t matter anyway because these financial sharpies will just restructure their hedge funds in ways that will allow them to avoid paying taxes like the rest of us.

Why on earth should hedge funds pay lower rates that the rest of America? They certainly can’t demonstrate that they add value to our economy. The only claim they honestly can make is the one that has surfaced many times throughout human history: We are powerful. We set the rules. We deserve what we get...and more...and more. And politicians with their hands out will always find ways to help.

Why are we putting up with this?

A groundbreaking study by Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University provides some important insights. Using a nationwide survey of more than 5,000 respondents, they discovered that most Americans have no idea how skewed our income distribution really is. Virtually everyone surveyed believes our wealth distribution is much fairer than it actually is. And when people were asked to come up with their ideal wealth distribution, 92 percent chose the wealth distribution of Sweden! (PDF)

More amazing still was that it doesn't matter whether you are Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, black or white, male or female. Everyone wants more economic fairness.

And yet, we get more and more inequality, led by hedge fund elites.

As the study strongly suggests, the key to unlocking our pent-up desire for fairness is to develop a widely shared understanding of just how skewed our income distribution really is. And that starts with shining a blazing bright light on hedge funds elites, who will enjoy the sunshine about as much as Dracula does.

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute in New York, and author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green, 2009).

Source:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/151569/how_dracula_hedge_funds_are_sucking_us_dry_/
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