US Ranks 6th in Private Report on Electronic Surveillance

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I don’t know how accurate this report from Cryptohippie.com (hat-tip to Sunni Maravillosa) is, but I thought it was interesting.

It ranks countries as police states, based on 17 factors:

1) Daily documents 2) Border issues 3) Financial tracking 4) Gag orders 5) Anti-crypto laws 6) Constitutional protection 7) Data storage ability 8)Data retention ability 9) ISP data retention 10) Telephone data retention 11) Cell phone records 12) Medical records 13) Enforcement ability 14) Habeas Corpus 15) Police-Intel barrier 16) Covert hacking 17) Loose warrants

At the top were the communist countries: China and North Korea.

Then came the former communist countries: Belarus and Russia

Next:  the UK, US, and Singapore

Please note:: I couldn’t find much about the privacy firm that created the report, Cryptohippie, and have no idea how authoritative the report is. Any further insights are welcome.

Maria Callas Sings Casta Diva

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Maria Callas sings Casta Diva (O Pure Goddess) from Bellini’s Norma.

This is one of the most beautiful examples of bel canto I know, and who better to sing it than Callas…

It’s an invocation to the moon goddess by Norma, the Druid priestess who prophesies the fall of Rome. A nice fit for my little blog’s entry into the world of multimedia…..

O Pure Goddess, who silvers
These sacred ancient plants,
Turn thy beautiful semblance on us
Unclouded and unveiled...
Temper, O Goddess,
The brave zeal
Of the ardent spirits,
Scatter on the earth the peace
Thou make reign in the sky…

PS: Here’s a quite lovely one by pop singer Nana Mouskouri, imaginatively set in Greece.

Massive Push to Criminalize Criticism of Israel (Links/Video added)

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Paul Craigs Roberts writes about H. R. 1913 (“Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009”), at Counterpunch:

“It has been true for years that the most potent criticism of Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians comes from the Israeli press and Israeli peace groups.  For example, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Jeff Halper of ICAHD have shown a moral conscience that apparently does not exist in the Western democracies where Israel’s crimes are covered up and even praised.

Will the American hate crime bill be applied to Haaretz and Jeff Halper?  Will American commentators who say nothing themselves but simply report what Haaretz and Halper have said be arrested for “spreading hatred of Israel, an anti-semitic act”? ……….

A massive push is underway to criminalize criticism of Israel.  American university professors have fallen victim to the well organized attempt to eliminate all criticism of Israel.  Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at a Catholic university because of the power of the Israel Lobby. Now the Israel Lobby is after University of California  (at Santa Barbara,) professor Wiliam Robinson. Robinson’s crime:  his course on global affairs included some reading assignments critical of Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

The Israel Lobby apparently succeeded in convincing the Obama Justice (sic) Department that it is anti-semitic to accuse two Jewish AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, of spying.  The Israel Lobby succeeded in getting their trial delayed for four years, and now Attorney General Eric Holder has dropped charges.  Yet, Larry Franklin, the DOD official accused of giving secret material to Rosen and Weissman, is serving 12 years and 7 months in prison….”

My Comment (May 8, 2009):

H.R. 1913 was sponsored by Rep. John Conyers [D, MI-14] and voted on by the House on April 29, 2009 (passing 248-175 with largely Democrat support).

Complaints about the legislation have focused on several things.

  • The bill’s perceived fuzziness in defining the class of protected persons (“sexual orientation”) and in defining “bodily injury.” Both could make the legislation very elastic in application
  • The possibility that the legislation could be used to chill religious speech
  • The possibility that pastors who preach orthodox Christian views on controversial social issues could be prosecuted if an unstable person in their congregation later commits a “hate crime”
  • The granting of even more federal power to oversee, fund, direct, and intervene in local and state authorities
  • The redundancy of new legislation on “hate crimes” (since there are such laws already on the books)
  • The elusiveness of  the notion of “hate crime” and its inherent intrusiveness, since it claim to assess the state of mind of the perpetrator and the victim and of a whole class to which the victim belongs.

Christian groups have been particularly agitated by it, believing that it principally targets fundamentalist/orthodox Christian preachers.

That may well be so, but in the context of the financial scandal and ongoing Middle Eastern policies, I’d argue that the legislation has as much to do with criticism of the US government, especially of Zionist and Middle Eastern policies. For instance, see this effort at ending protests against US aid to Israel, at Muzzlewatch.

H.R. 1913, like H. R. 1955 before it, is meant for home-grown dissidents, a.k.a., people who object to federal government policies.

Action: Please call your  House or Senate representative at 1-877-851-6437 or toll 1-202-225-3121. and urge them not to vote for yet another thought crimes bill HR 1913.

Think of the two initiatives below as further context:

1. US Army Concept of Operations for Police Intelligence Operations, 4 Mar 2009 (see wikileaks)

2. The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (H.R. 1955/S- 1959, a bill sponsored by Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) in the 110th United States Congress. It was introduced in the House on April 19 2007, passing on Oct 23, 2007, was introduced to the Senate on August 2, 2007 as S-1959, declared dead on arrival there after a powerful grass-roots campaign against it,

but has since been referred to the House Committee on Ways and Means, April 2, 2009, according to wiki.

H.R. 1955

What’s with Simon Johnson?

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From Seeking Alpha:

“An actual debate on a receivership bill would be contentious and damaging, and might well involve the insertion of policy provisions that would make the whole thing too unwieldy to do any good. It would also require the appropriation of hundreds of billions of dollars for the banks, to make creditors whole enough to avoid financial panic; fiscal costs cannot be avoided. Money for banks obviously isn’t a popular priority these days. And if a bank takeover spooked depositors, who then began pulling money out of the bank, the administration might have to come back to Congress for even more money.

And that’s just the part of the trouble. Legal challenges would be likely, to either the receivership law or to a specific episode of nationalization. Even if nothing bad happened, markets might get jittery. And in the end, no one has any idea what might be necessary to handle the nationalization of a firm like Citigroup, in terms of personnel, finances, or time.”

That’s Ryan Avent at Seeking Alpha.

Avent points out that Simon Johnson is right to say that government policy is trapped in the web of financial interests (Lila: When was it ever any other way?).

But he also points out that Johnson is incorrect to say that objections to nationalization are simply ideological and a reaction to the label. There are real constraints involved.

Meanwhile at American Prospect Magazine, Tim Fenholz, substantiates this last point when he notes that the main obstacle to nationalization has been Congress, not the financial elites oligarchs

(Lila: of course, Congress is in the pockets of the elites oligarchs too)

My Comment:

As I blogged before, I’m not convinced by Simon Johnson, who seems to have been pushed out suddenly into the fray in the past few weeks, that is, as soon as the sheen had rubbed off Paul Krugman’s halo, as arch defender of the public good (and this isn’t to deny that Krugman was in the front in pointing out the huge inequities between top earners and the bottom in the 1990s and thereafter).

Then, Nouriel Roubini, who struck me as the administration’s ‘designated Dr. Doom,’ was found to have financial ties with Summers.

Not good.

So now, suddenly  Simon Johnson, a former IMF economist (he was there in 2007 when the crisis was breaking), who was actually favorably disposed to the bailout when it was first touted (September 2008),  is splashed across at The Atlantic, on NPR podcasts and everywhere else, urging immediate nationalization in full populist mode.

Here’s what Johnson said on September 27 2008, about the first bail out proposal.

Johnson:

“Let’s call the $700bn package currently under discussion Plan A.  Despite the roadblock thrown up by the House Republicans, we think some form of this plan will pass Congress soon, and so it should…………If Plan A comes out of Congress in reasonable shape, as seems likely, we will support it. We need it to work….”

Posted by Simon Johnson, September 27, 2008 at 6:45 am on Johnson’s co-authored blog, The Baseline Scenario.

Lila:

Does this sound like Johnson was on top of things then? And if he didn’t catch on then, or the year before when he was at the IMF, why is he suddenly the go-to guy?

The economic situation is grave. But it’s only this grave because the government handed over money to the banks in the first place. That should be UNDONE through racketeering charges. Meanwhile, the money given should be frozen while investigation proceeds.

When the government shows it knows how to play by the rules it imposes on citizens, then you’ll see market confidence restored.

I agree that antitrust laws could/should be used to break up the banks –  there’s a problem of size. But developing new laws at this point, hurriedly, as Johnson tells us is necessary, doesn’t sound right to me. In my opinion, existing criminal and civil laws should be used. But the problem really is there’s no political will to actually do that (so it seems); instead, you have another change of the rules and structures.

Insiders Selling the Rally

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Insiders are selling this rally like crazy, so says The Pragmatic Capitalist:

“I recently wrote about reports that insider selling was at record highs and buying was practically non-existent.  The selling has become even more alarming in the last week and the buying has slowed to an absolute trickle. Below you’ll find the list of latest insider buys and sells.  The sells are staggering with the amounts ranging from $3MM to $63MM (and I was only able to copy one page).  The buys, on the other hand, are meager and range from $100K to $635K (the $800K purchase is a few months old and shouldn’t be in the data).   You’ll also notice that the screen came up with just 18 total purchases vs 170 total sales (the lowest of sell screen data were sales of over $400K which is not shown here due to the large size of the results…”

My Comment

Wall Street, as well as the administration, both want to boost the market for reasons that partially overlap. The administration wants to be able to justify the bail-outs and retain some of the shine of of the pre-election rhetoric of “change”.  But too much optimism will work against legislation/reforms that need a certain amount of panic to be passed.

Wall Street, on the other hand, doesn’t want panic at any price. It wants stability and optimism. And is eager to jump at any positive news it gets.

Mike Martin at MartinKronicle has a long and interesting interview with Victor Sperandeo (of “Trader Vic”), who calls it – as most informed commentators do – a bear market rally.  Sperandeo’s voice is a bit hard to follow but Martin’s questions are searching and cover a lot of ground.

Two points:

Sperandeo (like nearly everyone else) thinks currency depreciation is inevitable and massive inflation around the corner.

He’s pessimistic about the Middle East situation and anticipates more friction with Iran.

Paulson, Bernanke Caught Red-Handed in Fraud?

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From Casey Research:

“On April 23, 2009, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sent a letter to Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Chris Dodd; Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank; SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro; and Chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel Elizabeth Warren.

The letter outlined how former Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke forced Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch – even though Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis and the board of directors tried to pull the plug on the deal after it turned out that Merrill Lynch was far deeper in debt than it had admitted……….

…the part of the story that could really break Al Paulson and Don Bernanke’s necks is the failure to inform the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as Bank of America’s shareholders, of the extent of toxic waste Bank of America was forced to accept. That’s fraud, pure and simple.“

My Comment:

The only problem is – who will bell the cat? Goldman Sachs’ reach is vast. And I doubt that Goldman is acting alone or purely out of its own interests,  although its own interests are no doubt paramount.

Think about it.

How was this bank’s reach and corruption not noticed before? Even Lisa Endlich’s very staid history of the firm in 1999 couldn’t conceal the slime.

So what gives?

C. S. Lewis on Habit and Will

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“No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”

C. S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters,” p. 71.

Beat Up a White Kid Day [Added links]

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A posting on facebook tells me that there is such a thing as “Beat Up a White Kid Day,” apparently a kind of May-day ritual.

I was astounded and first thought it must be some kind of prank, but there it is on wiki:

“However he [Judge Russo] concluded that “based on the evidence I’ve heard, May Day is reality and the evidence was overwhelming that this was an attack based on May Day and that the victim was chosen because she was white.” In drawing such a conclusion, Judge Russo suggested that white students in Cleveland’s integrated public schools have reason to fear assaults by minorities in so-called May Day attacks every May 1.”

Lila:

The judge in question was Cuyahoga juvenile court judge Russo, who was ruling on the beating up of Melissa King, a 13 year old student at Wilbur Wright Middle School in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 1, 2003, by a group of black and hispanic children. Although the immediate cause in this case was a personal vendetta, almost everyone in the case, seems to have acknowledged the reality of “Beat Up a White Kid Day.”

Since there’s been so much talk about white supremacists and their links to tax protesters and militia groups, I thought it was only right to show that such ideologies don’t rise in a vacuum. There’s plenty of hate anger to go around. [Lila: hate is misused as a word so I changed it to anger] And here’s one instance.

What was the reaction?

In Cleveland, the original story brought a flood of more than 100 letters to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in which readers wrote that in fact this had been a May-day ritual for many years in desegregated communities and that many of them had been afraid of going to school on that day.

I’ll be retuning to this blog post  to add any links to interesting aspects of the media coverage of this (or lack of it).

(And yes, I know I have two other posts I have to return to to update…bear with me).

OK.  Remember Jena in Louisiana ? In 2006 a white student, Justin Barker, was attacked by six black students, setting off a case that had the whole country in a ruckus.

In this Alternet piece, a black commentator looks at Jena and sees excessive fear of young black males that leads to their being sentenced much more stiffly than whites for comp[arable crimes.

On one site. black readers’ comments show that the central fact of the Jena case for them was the hanging of nooses.

That was seen by many of the whites in Jena as a prank.

For the whites the physical beating far outweighed the symbolic threat of the nooses (equivalent to cross-burning).

Here’s a Counterpunch article on it that plays up that angle. But there are some interesting slants in the piece which grate on me a bit. Picking apart the language of Jena residents (who refer to “coloreds” and “our blacks”) is a bit silly. Small town people without requirements to be PC in their language are going to express themselves in ways that are not as ‘sensitive’ as less insular society demands. This probably means nothing.  And what was the need to emphasize that there was only one black person on the 9 member school board and only one black man in the 10 member parish government?  Jena had a little less than 3000 people at the time. The African-American population is around 3500. That means the Af-Am percentage was at the time a bit over 10%. That means the racial make-up of the board seems quite fair, even if you subscribe to such numerical tests. [Correction: I have to go back and look at the hispanic population and find out how much of a difference to my calculations adding it would make].

But I digress. While I can find any number of articles on the Jena 6, most of them focusing on southern racism and noose hanging, I can find hardly any on Beat Up a White Kid Day. And on forums I’ve seen, the attitude is that there can be no race hatred among minorities because racism is related to power structure.

With Barack Obama now president, that leaves us with several possible positions.

One. Blacks now are part of the power-structure and can be as racist as whites.

Two. Blacks really aren’t part of the power-structure, and Obama is just a figure-head.

[In that case we need to ask who really is in power].

Three.  There are many kinds of power. Opinion-making is also power.

Media Coverage:

On the Jena story, digging through links, I got an American Journalism Review piece which covers the media coverage (always the most interesting part of an American news story). The piece shows that the national media actually didn’t touch the story until 5 months later, when black bloggers and activists like Alan Sharpton had made a furor over it, and then they almost uncritically accepted the version put out by an activist called Alan Bean. The AJR piece questions Bean’s portrayal of the story, raising several points that also struck me.

Here’s a quote from AJR:

“Out of 57 stories:

Only eight stories allude to Mychal Bell’s prior criminal record….

Ten stories use the phrase “all white” to describe the jury that found Mychal Bell guilty of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery. None explains why the jury was all white…..

Multiple stories describe the tree the nooses were found on as a “white tree”…… No stories question if the description is correct, and none asks students about the tree. Only the L.A. Times does not describe the tree as “white.”

Descriptions of white student Justin Barker’s medical condition vary from paper to paper and from story to story.…….. [Lila: here’s a link to what is seems to be an injured Justin Barker. From the looks of it, the beating doesn’t seem too bad. ]

The Washington Post, the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune never, in months of coverage, mention Barker’s medical bills. [Lila: the medical bills seem to be equivalent to the cost of an ambulance, ER, stitches and a bit more – roughly $12,000; again, more like injuries in a school brawl)……….

All four papers link the events in Jena multiple times, without ever explaining why they’re linked…………

Thirty stories quote civil rights activists, organizations or advocates. Eight stories quote Jesse Jackson; twelve quote Al Sharpton; others quote the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP. Six quote Alan Bean of Friends of Justice five of them in the Chicago Tribune………

….. In a piece titled “How One Man Fired Up Jena 6 Case,” [Jason] Whitlock wrote that the media blindly accepted Bean’s story, to the detriment of the truth. Why? Because it was easy, he says.”

Lila: To put this in perspective, consider another race-hate crime in the last two years:

The Megan Williams torture case: in which a twenty-year old black woman was held captive for several days, sexually abused, forced to eat faeces, and stabbed by six whites, according to this AP report.

One of the defendants in this case got 10-25 years for second-degree sexual assault and another got three consecutive sentences, one for 10 years for violation of civil rights and the others for 2-10 years for assault.

Put this against what Mychal Bell, the 16 year old defendant at Jena, was initially charged with. He was charged as an adult with attempted second-degree murder (Lila: surely excessive). Later, this was reduced to aggravated second-degree battery.

At his initial conviction Bell faced up to 22 years in prison. On retrial, this was reduced to simple battery and finally he served 18 months altogether.

Lila (May 6):

Well, I don’t agree with the comment that “blacks are not part of the power structure” unless you want to say the president of the USA , the AG and a number of other positions are completely devoid of power. In which case, whites haven’t been all that powerful either. I think the third position is the correct one. There are many kinds of power: there’s money power, there’s political power, there’s public opinion, there’s academic opinion, there’s moral force, there’s biological power….

We tend to focus on money power/political power to make claims about the power or lack thereof of minorities. And largely, I think that’s correct – when you’re talking about structures of law, administration and institutions where those kinds of power hold sway. But there are other realms, as I’ve indicated.

My point is our discussion of race is abysmally simple-minded. We think in slogans and in memes. And that gets echoed in real life.  Ultimately, this kind of mass thinking drives real life victimization, especially in troubled times. Exactly how it does this needs to be explored.

But this post is long enough now, and I’ll leave it at that.

PS (May 6): The context that is ignored in all this is inter-racial crime, crime that is not characterized as hate-crime officially, but is felt among whites as racially motivated. But since a post on this would be lengthy and involved I’ll address it separately.

Swine Flu Hysteria Feeds Drug Cartels

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Confirmation from Bill Engdahl that indeed swine flu is being hyped, with the WHO leading the hyping.  The public has such a short memory. Doesn’t it remember that Tamiflu was the drug Rumsfeld was touting for avian flu a few years ago?

Engdahl point out that even the term “swine flu” is being dropped in favor of Influenza 2, in response to lobbying from pork manufacturers, even though  toxic (that is, faeces-filled) factory farms, like Smithfields’ are said to be the probably source of the outbreak.

Engdahl:

“The Drug Cartel comes in

Rather than order a full-scale independent investigation into the pathogen-generation in the toxic waste of Smithfield Foods’ Veracruz CAFO pig operations or other similar pig CAFOs around the world for production of deadly toxics and various possible pathogens, the CDC and increasingly the WHO seem to be more concerned with creating a climate for mass distribution of what have been documented to be dangerous, and in some cases deadly, influenza drugs such as Tamiflu.

On April 14, almost two weeks before the panic over Mexico’s cases of Swine Flu or as CDC now prefers, Influenza A H1N1, the US pharmaceutical company, Novavax announced a pre-clinical study allegedly showing, ‘an investigational H1N1 virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine based on the 1918 Spanish influenza strain protected against both the Spanish flu and a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza strain.’ The genetically-manipulated vaccine of Novavax, the company claimed, ‘protected Mice and Ferrets Against the Spanish Flu and Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Bird Flu,’ and also conveniently ‘provided protection against highly pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1 Influenza strains.’[16]

On April 24, the WHO issued a press release stating that ‘The Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected in pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to oseltamivir…’ Osteltamivir is the technical name for Tamiflu, the drug invented by Donald Rumsfeld’s Gilead Sciences and licensed to Roche Inc. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a convenient Emergency Authorization on April 27 that allows US health officials and others to administer Tamiflu even to infants under one year of age. The FDA statement added it had decided, ‘to authorize the use of unapproved or uncleared medical products or unapproved or uncleared uses of approved or cleared medical products following a determination and declaration of emergency.’[17]

That suggests that the US Government has or is about to release experimental drugs on a panicked population such as the VLP-based Influenza vaccine of Novavax, as well as the vast stockpiles of Tamiflu and influenza drugs sold by giants like GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza (zanamivir).

With the evidence to date of the scale of the ‘confirmed’ cases of Swine Flu H1N1 variety worldwide, 985 cases of influenza A (H1N1) or Swine Flu infection, there is hardly grounds to subject the human population to drugs whose side effects have included death or severe complications and typically flu-like symptoms and, as in the case of Tamiflu, never even claim to ‘prevent or cure’ the influenza. The entire drama of the past weeks is reading more and more like a bad remake of Crichton’s Andromeda Strain.

Adding a note of the bizarre to the entire drama, in November 2004, amid the early days of the then-world panic over alleged Avian Flu, when Tamiflu was first promoted as a wonder drug by Donald Rumsfeld and others, the WHO published an extraordinary fantasy scenario. In a UN agency normally given to issuing dull scientific notices to world health professionals, the 2004 report was extraordinarily ‘prescient’ of the current scenario with Swine Flu panic……….

…..If one changed the name from Influenza A (H6N1) to Influenza A (H1N1) we could be talking about the current situation.”

Lila: Notice that Mexico now plans to implement a $1.3 billion economic stimulus package to counter the effects of the outbreak on the economy. Presumably this will help increase government spending, government control and global coordination – all long-term goals of the globalists.

Credible Tax Protesting

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For a tax-protest to be credible, the protester has to show evidence of good-faith.

Here are some points to consider:

  • It’s futile to argue the constitutionality of laws that the courts themselves have repeatedly ruled are constitutional. The enforceable law is whatever the courts say it is. The law of God, natural law, morality, your personal opinions, your rabid convictions won’t count when it comes to enforcement. Sorry.
  • There is a legitimate part of government – admittedly a small one – which goes toward services the citizenry receive.  A good-faith tax protest would pay up that amount.
  • A good-faith tax protest would not involve teaching tax-evasion methods (there’s a big difference between evading and avoiding taxes) to uninformed people that lands them in jail.
  • A good-faith tax protester would not receive any services from the government, or would pay for those he’s obliged to receive from need. He might even overpay to show good faith. He might put the some of the money he owed (say, money that would have gone to war or to the bail-out) to some civic use – not because he is obliged to, but to show that his unwillingness to pay taxes doesn’t stem from venality.  He might place it in a family foundation that would benefit his own family but at the same time be of use to the community. The purpose of his act is to change enough minds to change the law. Establishing his credibility is part of that.
  • A good-faith tax protest would be conducted from start to finish publicly because its purpose is public – to protest the tax. A protest is a public act.

If you want to engage in counter-economics, then you should know its activities are criminal and will be so regarded. Don’t expect sympathy from the rest of the public which does pay its taxes.

Notice that the media has made a distinction between the tax-resistance of the Vietnam war era and contemporary tax resisters – emphasizing the “white supremecist” elements and scams in the latter (and doubtless there are many).

Expect most people to believe (and, unfortunately, in some cases they will be right about it) that you are just another free-loader on the system.

Check out this factsheet to see how the government views tax protesters like Irwin Schiff.

And here’s a sympathetic view of Irwin Schiff from Libertarian Republican.

My view? I don’t know Schiff’s case in detail but I’m not persuaded by his methods, though sympathetic to his aims.

My suggestion, if you really don’t want to be subject to Uncle Sam, leave the country. Drop citizenship.

A large mass of people renouncing US citizenship is the smartest, least problematic way to defund the US government.