They know where you are: adventures in domestic spying

It was easy to put the black hat on the evil-doers of the Bush Imperium, with their full-throttle propaganda declaring the triumphalism of good over evil and the virtues of the military fighting for the freedom of Halliburton overseas, while the government was curtailing civil liberties domestically. With the ascent of Barack Obama, there was a short-lived belief that the worst transgressions against individual civil rights, as exemplified in the Patriot Act, would come to an end. They did not.


Part I- Background

Earlier this year reports were made public of continued violations of federal laws that constrained the domestic surveillance of American citizens by the NSA (National Security Agency); a secretive intelligence agency that operates out of a black cube-shaped building outside Baltimore, MD. The violations were an extension of the massive data sweeps initiated by the Bush Administration and executed in part by the telecommunications companies on behalf of the state. The reported violations involve data on tens of millions of domestic phone calls and emails, providing the agency with the ability to conduct “data-mining” operations that yield extensive intelligence on large numbers of Americans. The government furthermore, was forced to admit that the NSA had operational plans of spying on select congressmen who were visiting overseas.

The persisting conceit that America is this shinning beacon of freedom and liberty is a complete myth. The criminal excesses of the executive branch and intelligence community against its own citizens, members of the legislative branch, and the press throughout this past decade are in display for all to view. Last year the "FISA Amendment Act essentially provided congressional sanction for the secret and illegal warrantless wiretapping program initiated by the Bush administration in 2001." Then Senator Barack Obama, left the campaign trail to cast his vote in support of this unconstitutional legislation and provide "support and comfort" for the American police state and its henchmen.

The act, approved with the support of the entire Democratic leadership in the House and nearly half of the Democratic senators, overturned even the limited restraints on government spying that existed under the FISA law passed in 1978, in the wake of revelations of gross abuses of power by the White House and the intelligence agencies under the Nixon administration.

Mr. Obama's Justice Department, mimicking their predecessor's penchant for statist philosophy, made the claim to the courts adjudicating individual cases brought against the government on the matter of domestic wiretapping violations, that 'the government enjoys “sovereign immunity,” meaning that no citizen can sue the government.'

The Obama administration’s uncompromising defense of illegal domestic spying under the Bush White House is not only an attempt to prevent anyone from being held accountable for these crimes and to bar the American people from learning the extent of the surveillance conducted against them. It is also a defense of the continuation of these same essential practices today, hidden behind a wall of secrecy.

Part II- GPS Tracking

Scott Horton over at Harper's Magazine's blog has recently come across an even more invasive practice conducted by the NSA and the telecom companies. Apparently in one situation, Sprint Nextel has been providing law enforcement agencies in America with the GPS coordinates of its cell phone customers (some eight million times per year); without any of the customers providing consent or either knowing anything about it. Sprint Manager of Electronic Surveillance Paul Taylor revealed the government monitoring technology at an industry conference

We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy.

So, not only has the American police state decided they do not require warrants to read or listen to your personal communications, they can and will track you or any other person within American territory, just like an inmate released on day-parole, with the use of your own cell phone.

American Fascism brought to you by the letters 'W' and 'O'.

The Cult of Personality- Mr. Obama & Liberals

Glenn Greenwald has a wonderful post explaining how those on the political right, with George W. Bush, and on the left, with current US president Obama, voluntarily abdicated rationality and independence to engage in hero-worship of their beloved leaders. He elaborates

Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar in kind to those whose reaction to Obama is dominated by their view of him as an inspiring, kind, sophisticated, soothing and mature intellectual. These are personality types bolstered with sophisticated marketing techniques, not policies, governing approaches or ideologies. But for those looking for some emotional attachment to a leader, rather than policies they believe are right, personality attachments are far more important. They're also far more potent. Loyalty grounded in admiration for character will inspire support regardless of policy, and will produce and sustain the fantasy that this is not a mere politician, but a person of deep importance to one's life who -- like a loved one or close friend or religious leader -- must be protected and defended at all costs.

A year into his administration, Mr. Obama appears either unable or unwilling to exorcise the demons of corporatism, militarism, and crony-capitalism that have long possessed congress and made any real reform, in favor of the public interest, impossible. Whether it is the promised reforms to Washington's corrupt and as usual politics or putting an end to the many reckless and undemocratic Bush era policies, a great many of those on the left who once believed Mr. Obama's exhubrant rheotric, are seething at the lack of change. As Bob Herbert of the New York Times said in his column, "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House."

Why do you make them so stupid, God?

Every time I review a poll done assessing the average American's grasp of economics, public policy, or science I cringe. The latest is a doozy!

According to the a Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey no less than 44% of Americans polled wish that Dubya was still in the White House managing affairs. As a quick recap, lets look at Mr. Bush's greatest accomplishments and legacy:

• Failed to prevent terrorists from attacking America on 11-Sept. 2001
• Invaded Afghanistan, but failed to capture and prosecute Bin Laden
• Assisted members of the Bin Laden family and assorted Saudi nationals to leave America eight days after 9-11
• Illegally invaded Iraq to the opposition of nearly the entire planet
• Mismanaged the entire Iraq War and let terrorism exponentially grow across the world
• Allowed nuclear weapons proliferation to rogue nations like North Korea and Iran
• Ignored New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck and let the city nearly be destroyed by his administration's incompetence and neglect
• Tried to scuttle and then block corporate crime prevention legislation, after the first wave of corporate criminality (i.e. Enron, WorldCom,...etc.)
• Produced virtually no jobs during his eight years in office, that is capped by two recessions
• Caused the greatest economic meltdown in the history of the world (in terms of absolute size) through his deregulatory and laissez-faire policies
• Increased the US National Debt by 86% (i.e. $4.9 Trillion)
• Eliminated the 800 year rule of habeas corpus in common law
• Instituted torture, extraordinary rendition, and indefinite imprisonment as common tools against enemies of the state and created concentration camps and CIA controlled "black-sites" for torturing/executing prisioners overseas
• Conducted a series of wide reaching and illegal searches of Americans personal email, phone calls, physical mail, purchasing habits, library and book borrowing habits, and monitored public speech
• Criminalized public protest of Republicans during his election convention in 2004
• Stole or rigged three elections (2000, 2002, and 2004) through well documented forms of fraud, voter intimidation, destruction of ballots, and suppression of Democratic voters
• Attempted to create a unitary Presidency in violation of the US Constitution
• Politicized every office and branch of the US government to serve his dogmatic Christianist and pro-business agendas.
• Denied man-made Climate Change was occurring for years, then when he said that it did exist, stated that there was nothing anyone could do about it.... etc.

What type of world are these people living in that they think George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, Donald Rumsfeld, Condollezza Rice, and rest of the criminal junta that ran America off the cliff and made it the most loathed nation in the world, should be allowed back into the White House?

Well, it is most likely the same world inhabited by Americans, who in another Pew survey, think that the world's leading economic power is China. An incomprehensible 44% of Americans polled thought that China, a country with an economy one-sixth as large as the US and where the majority of people have no indoor plumbing and are agrarian farmers, has the world's largest economy. They are also equally likely to be amongst the, "19% of the public [that] says the use of torture is often justified to gain important information from terrorist suspects... [or the] 35% [that] say the use of torture in these circumstances is at least sometimes justified."

There you have it! A large percentage of Americans believe that Bush should have remained as president, that torture is an excellent and ethically sound policy, and that China is economically more significant than America. FUCKING RETARDS!

Goldman Sachs PR Initiative

Every time Goldman Sachs waddles out a policy meant to assuage public criticism of their morally bankrupt behavior, they only expose their inherent inability to understand the scope of the animus that has been generated. The NY Times has an article outlining that Goldman Sachs top executives will forgo direct cash bonuses for deferred stock options that are contingent on the overall performance of the bank over the period of the next five years.

In 2007, [GS's CEO Lloyd Blankfein] was paid about $67.5 million, a Wall Street record. This year, he and 29 other top executives will receive bonuses that would be quite large, but they will be in the form of what Goldman called “shares at risk,” or stock that cannot be sold for five years and can be retracted if the executive does something that hurts the firm. Goldman has long paid a portion of bonuses in stock.

All this is just public relations, because for the majority of those engaged in Goldman Sachs casino capitalism scam, the winning never stops. For example, the majority of the investment bank's employees will still receive their record-sized bonuses this year, with the average employee receiving $700,000 USD. Despite the company being literally saved by the taxpayer, the crooks at GS will continue to for years to come, to hand out half of their profit to the grinning fiends on Goldman's payroll. To the general public shareholder they have said, "It would give [them] a say in determining compensation." However, any such vote will not be binding! Imagine that you tell your employee that he's not entitled to a bonus and he pats you on the head and says, "Thanks for your opinion, but if I want it I'll tell you what to say!"

To be fair, Goldman Sachs is not alone in this egregious behavior. Many of the largest entities that took TARP funds are rushing to repay their loans, so that the government will no longer be given the legal option of limiting executive compensation packages. Bank of America and Citibank have officially said they are moving in this direction. Given the extraordinary amounts secretly given to all these banks by the FED, it is impossible to determine how much money has actually been transferred between the government and Wall Street; however.

On the point of executive compensation in general, I have to say to those who bemoan that they have to pay these bankers massive salaries to preserve talent, you're a fool. First, if you blow up the global economy and push your company into defacto bankruptcy you should be fired. Investing is a zero-sum game. Making a bundle through casino-capitalism means someone else got screwed. In the recent Wall St. fiasco that 'someone' was everyday people and general investors who saw their 401K's disintegrate, their retirement funds nuked, and the value of their homes fall off the cliff. Furthermore, those same people who saw their personal wealth vanish, were forced to incur further debt by accepting government backed bailouts of the bankers who caused the mess in the first place.

Secondly, the executives of these companies aren't the company and they should not be treated as if they and they alone have the exclusive expertise and talent to meet shareholders demands. What should be evident, is Goldman's institutional influence within the shadowy halls of government, the offices of bank regulators, and in the boardrooms of multinationals is the primary reason why they have succeeded. Individuals, even CEO's, do not have this clout or ability, so why compensate them for what they do not possess? Recent history has shown that many executives who have left Goldman Sachs for other companies or other professions have fallen flat on their faces. Former GS CEO Robert Rubin's performance at Citibank should be recognized as a total catastrophe for shareholders of that company and Jon Corizine's (another GS CEO) single term as governor of NJ was so uninspiring, the citizens of the state decided they'd rather have a Republican running the state a mere ten months after Dubya left the White House.

How's that Surge Working Bub?

In 2007, George W Bush authorized the the deployment of more than 20,000 soldiers into Iraq, five additional brigades, and sent the majority of them into Baghdad. It was called "the surge" and was meant, at least as far as the public was concerned, to provide the time and conditions conducive to reconciliation among political and ethnic factions. Considerable discussion was made by American politicians during the 2008 Presidential election about the merits of the surge strategy and the failing Iraq War. President Obama, who as a candidate vigorously opposed the surge, now takes a less explicitly oppositional stance to it as he continues with his predecessor's failed polices of throwing good money after bad decisions. As an example, according to the New York Times,

A series of car bombs on Tuesday ripped through Baghdad in Iraq's deadliest attack in six weeks, a brutal reminder of the threat still posed by an insurgency that has killed thousands since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Health Ministry officials said 77 people died, but police sources put the figure higher at 112.

The attacks came hours before the government announced March 7 as the date for the parliamentary election, ending weeks of political bickering that had delayed the vote from mid-January and could have complicated U.S. military withdrawal plans.

While the American public gleefully supports their Nobel Peace Prize winning Commander-in-Chief in his own attempt to execute a "Dubya-esque Surge" in Afghanistan (with an additional 30,000 troops), the Iraqi situation continues to be problematic, with persistent bombings, mass causalities, and a non-functioning federal state that is incapable of independently creating the conditions necessary for American soldiers to leave at any substantial level.

Palin versus Gore on Climate Change

I have made no attempt to deny over the past year my utter contempt for Sarah Palin, otherwise to be spoken of as Caribou Barbie, the Wasilla Whack-Job, or the grand priestess of American theo-fascist buffoonery. Until now, I had decided to ignore writing about her and the zombie masses that have flocked to her media-manufactured book tour out of sheer disdain. However, the Washington Post, in an attempt to completely repudiate itself as a newspaper, has decided to publish today (9 Dec. 2009) an op-ed written (or purportedly so) by Caribou Barbie, which lambastes scientists as opportunists and frauds, scientific debate as politicized drivel, and climate change mitigation as a massive exercise in liberal taxation and socialism.

I want to remind people, exactly what Sarah Palin believes in. First, she is a bigot who stated to her father, upon returning from a brief stint at Hawaii Pacific University, that she was "uncomfortable" around Asians and Pacific Islanders. “They were a minority type thing,” her father says, “and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” She makes the claim in her pseudo-biography/ manifesto that she had a great deal of "affection" for her gay roommate from college (which no one can find), but opposes all rights for gay couples, opposes allowing gays to serve openly in the military, opposes gay-inclusive hate crimes legislation, and opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

Second, she has no background and zero credentials to discuss any subject on science. Her entire history is one that dismisses empirical fact and core scientific knowledge for superstition, innuendo, and demonstrably false lies whenever it serves her personal or political needs. Palin is an evangelical Christian that believes in creationism, thinks that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and proposes that fundamentalist dogma should be taught in every public school; she is an adherent of end-of-times theology, which involves the conversion of the believers of Judaism to Christianity and the rapture; she has made proclamations for the removal of the constitutional separation of church-and-state; and she is against cell stem research or any scientific research that she arbitrarily dislikes. With respect to climate change, she has repeatedly clung to the odious supposition, without providing any corroborating evidence, that there is no man-made (i.e. anthropogenic) element to current atmospheric or climate changes.

In the WaPo op-ed, she specifically calls the stolen emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, proof that, "Leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." Unwilling to address the science itself or the overwhelming consensus generated by scientists and climate researchers across the planet for more than 20-years, she states that, "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes."

This woman is an absolute ignoramus and demagogue, who will lie and distort any fact to empower herself and the theo-fascists in the Republican Party that have surrounded her.

In response to this exhibition of white-trash duncery and recycled claptrap, Al Gore has been asked on repeated occasions to address her complaints about the entire Climate change debate and the current United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen (COP15). He states the obvious:

The global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?
The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies -- drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths [sic] in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.

These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists, who have warned for years that, if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation -- that's going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning.

Reasonable people can argue and dispute matters of opinion, but facts as to whether humans have injected extraordinary levels of greenhouse-effect producing gases into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is not subject to debate; it is a fact. There is no dispute that ocean levels are rising, whether the oceans are becoming acidified due to excess C02 in the atmosphere placed there by man, or even if this past decade and the decade of the 1990's have been the warmest in recorded human history. All these statements are facts that anyone can independently verify.

The twin forces of globalization and human tribalism have locked us all into a fearful downward spiral and there appears little hope that the majority of the human species is equipped to adjust to a low carbon economy, much less understand the dire situation we have created.

How to Kill an Economy: Eliminate the Middle-Class

Elizabeth Warren, the US Chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel overseeing the TARP, has an excellent article titled "America without the Middle Class" in the Huffington Post.

The article summarizes what many have been saying for the past thirty years; the American middle class is in serious decline. The macroeconomics should be clear to everyone. Income for middle class workers has been stagnant since the late 1970's. Permanent company jobs with lifetime employability and benefits are now non-existent, as short-term contract work and a mobile class of professional workers has become the norm. The American manufacturing base, once the envy of the world, has been hollowed out through corporate globalization reaching for the lowest common denominator. Union jobs, once the backbone of the middle class, are derided and repeatedly dismissed as inefficient and anti-capitalistic, while Wall Street's financial services as a percentage of GDP have doubled during the same period.

Warren illustrates the declining purchasing power of the middle class here:

In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

In order to maintain their standing of living, the American family was initially forced into having two wage earners in the family. With greater credit and a variety of other quick-debt schemes in the 1980's, these same middle-class denizens were enticed into believing that they, like every Republican Administration since Nixon, could just charge their concerns away. Remember Cheney saying, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter!"

The underlying strength of the American economy this past century has been the growth of the middle class and their attendant purchasing practices. New homes were built around highways leading to factories; cars in every driveway that would ferry the masses; increased attendance at colleges and universities that spawned further innovation and technological growth; and increased consumerism created mega-malls filled with shiny-happy shoppers. However, as the demographics shifted from rural agriculture and domestic manufacturing to a service-based economy, the captains of high-capital rejected Henry Ford's axiom that workers needed a decent wage in order to buy their employers produce.

Professor Warren concludes:

America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

Indeed. Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was on Democracy Now yesterday, also stated the obvious,

The reality is median family income has been stagnant for forty years, and the policies of what I call financialization, which is major banks trading assets back and forth, the Wall Street banks, such as Goldman, which is rightly a lightning rod right now for much of what’s going on, buying and selling, playing with tax dollars in proprietary trading—they make huge money, nothing is added to the economy, jobs are sent overseas. All of this going on simultaneously. That is what our economy has become.

The issue is simple. Government of all stripes and labels, be it Republicans or Democrats, have decided it was more important to bail out and feed the banks money borrowed by the middle-class, rather than institute policies that would nurture and enhance the middle class. As Spitzer says, "So what are the priorities, in terms of infrastructure investment, job creation, building the foundation of an economy that will permit us to be competitive so that real Americans can get jobs, not just investment bankers and lawyers?" A specific example of this short-term profit driven corporatism, is in the $12.9 Bn that was alone given to Goldman Sachs through the AIG government backed bailout. Compare that sum with the meager $4 Bn given to invest in K-12 education across the nation or the $8 Bn for high-speed trains. As usual, socialism for the rich, fuck-you-very much capitalism for the rest.

Chinese Students Caught Cheating...

Yes I know, it's a truism and anyone who has attended any university in North America consisting of a large population of Chinese students, knows that some unsavory academic behavior is not untypical.

BusinessWeek has an article titled "Crackdown on China GMAT Cheating."

The US company, which manages the Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT) recently won a copyright infringement court case in China against a local company that was distributing testing materials, questions, and answers to potential students. It also won a ruling against an American company, run by a Chinese national, "which allowed students to get a look at live questions from the GMAT exam." The scale of the operations and distribution of fraud were not elaborated in the article, but studies have shown due to the standardized nature of the Business School entrance test, more students partake in cheating than in other graduate study fields.

In addition to pursuing companies that facilitate cheating, the GMAT testing agency has

heightened security measures at testing centers [including] palm vein readers, which use infrared light to capture each test-taker's unique palm vein pattern, as well as digital photographs and passport scanners... The organization also has Web crawling software that scans 15 million Web sites every evening, looking for sites that illegally compile "live" GMAT questions.

The penalty imposed by GMAT for Chinese students committing user fraud have included revocation of test scores, notification to the universities to which the student has applied to of fraud, blocking individuals from re-taking the test for five years, and in one case, unspecified disciplinary action against one woman who, "took the GMAT on seven different occasions for seven different people."

Bankers Prepare for Open Revolution

Bloomberg has an article today on what may be the most interesting story of the year. The invertebrate vampire-squids of Goldman Sachs have been quietly seeking gun permits to protect themselves from the restless mobs and death-mail sending public. How is it that the proletarians could want to liquidate the robber-Barron's of the 21st Century? Surely, the masses know that Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs' CEO, and the squids are as Blanky said, "Doing God's work!"

The article reveals that Blanky and Company were fortifying their residences a year prior to the meltdown, by placing enhanced security fences and armed guards around their lavish estates, in excess to the norm. More importantly though, it blows the whistle on what the bailout was really about: saving the greedheads of casino-capitalism. As you see, this bullshit about efficient markets, innovative investing, and all that other gibberish spouted by the dunces on CNBC and virtually every financial bobble-head network, is just meant as high-fructose Kool-Aid for the cult-members as the real thieves take your money. Consider the following excerpt from the same Bloomberg article:

Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and -- oh yes -- the other banks. People “were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system.”

There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm’s revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses.

I have long said, if the people want to live free of the incompetent rule of plutocrats and their moneyed trolls, then they need to have the guillotine brought out in public and let the heads roll. Its all happened before and will happen again. We only have to remember the New Testament to know the solution:

Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. (Matthew 21:12)

More Chinese investment blunders

The following news-piece, from Al Jazeera, documents the enormous efforts the Chinese government has gone towards maintaining the illusion of growth and prosperity within their nation. They have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into so-called infrastructure with the publicly stated intention of increasing domestic mobility and instituting structural efficiencies. However, as the piece illustrates, substantial sums of that investment have gone into cosmetic and wholly unnecessary projects that may never have any real use. Consider the newly built city of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, built for over one million residents, but remains nearly vacant as no one has yet to move in.