The Progressive:

post by: Ray Duray  May 22, 2013

Think the IRS Was Bad? Try the Spying on Occupy Activists

With all the hullabaloo over the IRS’s special scrutiny of Tea Party groups, a far worse case of political meddling and governmental overreach has been going on: The spying on leftwing activists in the Occupy movement.

Thousands of documents obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy show how Homeland Security and local law enforcement were obsessed with the Occupy movement and other activists.

They treated Occupy activists as potential terrorists.

They infiltrated Occupy meetings.

They tracked Occupy activists online.

They kept an eye on the Rev. Jesse Jackson when he visited an Occupy protest in Phoenix.

They also monitored the protests against the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

And they shared information and coordinated planning with some of the very financial institutions that Occupy was protesting.

Based on these documents, I wrote the cover story for the June issue of The Progressive, “Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street.”

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, you have to wonder why Homeland Security and law enforcement were focusing so much attention on Occupy and ALEC activists rather than on those who presented a real risk of terrorism in the United States.

Michael Isikoff of NBC News notes that law enforcement in Boston were tracking Occupy protesters at the same time they were not following up on Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

The pursuit of Occupy activists was not a mere bureaucratic foul-up, as occurred in the IRS office in Cincinnati. It was a systematic effort by Homeland Security and law enforcement offices around the country to monitor left wing activists who were simply exercising their First Amendment rights.ENDS

tags: the progressive, matthew rothschild, democracy now, fbi, dhs, alec, spying, domestic spying, ows, tucson, phoenix | permalink | Show/Add Comments

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DHS spying on Occupy Movement

post by: Ray Duray  May 22, 2013

Editor of The Progressive Calls for Eric Holder to Resign over Spying on Press, Occupy Protesters

As the Obama administration faces criticism for the Justice Department’s spying on journalists and the IRS targeting of right-wing organizations, newly released documents show how the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and local police forces partnered with corporations to spy on Occupy protesters in 2011 and 2012. Detailed in thousands of pages of records from counter terrorism and law enforcement agencies, the spying monitored the activists’ online usage and led to infiltration of their meetings. One document shows an undercover officer was dispatched in Arizona to infiltrate activists organizing protests around the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),  the secretive group that helps corporate America propose and draft legislation for states across the country. We’re joined by Matt Rothschild of The Progressive, who tackles the surveillance in his latest article, "Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street." [Includes trandscript]  MORE

tags: democracy now, dhs, the progressive | permalink | Show/Add Comments

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Monsanto aided by State Dept.: Food & Water Watch

post by: Ray Duray  May 21, 2013

The Real News Network has the story...

Wikileaks Cables Reveal State Dept. Promoting GMOs Abroad

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Snitch

post by: Ray Duray  May 21, 2013

Undercover: Police Officer Connected to "NATO 5" Case Still Spying on Protest in Chicago

                                           Snitch

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Controlling the Message

post by: Ray Duray  May 21, 2013

Truthout has the story....

PBS Killed Wisconsin Uprising Documentary "Citizen Koch" To Appease Koch Brothers

"Citizen Koch," a documentary about money in politics focused on the Wisconsin uprising, was shunned by PBS for fear of offending billionaire industrialist David Koch, who has given $23 million to public television, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The dispute highlights the increasing role of private money in "public" television and raises even further concerns about the Kochs potentially purchasing eight major daily newspapers.

The film from Academy Award-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin documents how the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision helped pave the way for secret political spending by players like the Kochs, who contributed directly and indirectly to the election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in 2010 and came to his aid again when the battle broke out over his effort to limit collective bargaining. 

Originally slated to appear on PBS stations nationwide as part of the "Independent Lens" series, "Citizen Koch" had its funding pulled after David Koch was offended by another PBS documentary critical of the billionaire industrialists.

"People like the Kochs have worked for decades to undermine public funding for institutions like PBS," Deal told the Center for Media and Democracy. "When public dollars dry up, private dollars come in to make up for the shortfall."  MORE

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O-Bummer Care

post by: Ray Duray  May 21, 2013

Unions break ranks on ObamaCare

By Kevin Bogardus

The Hill, May 21,2013

http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/300881-labor-unions-break-ranks-on-health-lawVIA Steve Weiss

Labor unions are breaking with President Obama on ObamaCare.

Months after the president’s reelection, a variety of unions are publicly balking at how the administration plans to implement the landmark law. They warn that unless there are changes, the results could be catastrophic.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) — a 1.3 million-member labor group that twice endorsed Obama for president — is very worried about how the reform law will affect its members’ healthcare plans. 

Last month, the president of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers released a statement calling “for repeal or complete reform of the Affordable Care Act. [Continues.... ]

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EF-5 Tornado in Moore, Oklahoma

post by: Ray Duray  May 21, 2013

Dr. Jeff Masters provides numerous links and data points on yesterday's catastrophic tornado in Moore, OK. This will be one of the most damaging tornadoes ever in terms of property damage. Thanks to good warnings, casualties will not be nearly as severe as in tornadoes of the past. -RGD

Violent EF-5 Tornado Causes Catastrophic Damage in Moore, Oklahoma

tags: moore ok, tornado, ef-5, weather underground, dr. jeff masters | permalink | Show/Add Comments

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Rebecca Solnit recalls Occupy

post by: Ray Duray  May 19, 2013

TomDispatch features an essay by Rebecca Solnit. Here's her recitation of why Occupy matters. -RGD

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, What Comes After Hope

Select quote:

Not long ago, I ran into a guy who’d been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that great upwelling in southern Manhattan in the fall of 2011 that catalyzed a global conversation and a series of actions and occupations nationwide and globally. He offered a tailspin of a description of how Occupy was over and had failed.

But I wonder: How could he possibly know? It really is too soon to tell. First of all, maybe the kid who will lead the movement that will save the world was catalyzed by what she lived through or stumbled upon in Occupy Fresno or Occupy Memphis, and we won’t reap what she sows until 2023 or 2043. Maybe the seeds of something more were sown, as they were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 and Charter 77, for the great and unforeseen harvest that was the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the nonviolent overthrow of the Soviet totalitarian state in that country.

Second, Occupy began to say what needed to be said about greed and capitalism, exposing a brutality that had long been hushed up, revealing both the victims of debt and the rigged economy that created it. This country changed because those things were said out loud. I can’t say exactly how, but I know it mattered. So much that matters is immeasurable, unquantifiable, and beyond price. Laws around banking, foreclosure, and student loans are changing -- not enough, not everywhere, but some people will benefit, and they matter.  Occupy didn’t cause those changes directly, but it did much to make the voice of the people audible and the sheer wrongness of our debt system visible -- and gave momentum to the ongoing endeavors to overturn Citizens United and abolish corporate personhood.

Third, I only know a little of what the thousands of local gatherings and networks we mean by “Occupy” are now doing, but I know that Occupy Sandy is still doing vital work in the destruction zone of that hurricane and was about the best grassroots disaster relief endeavor this nation has ever seen. I know that Strike Debt, a direct offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, has relieved millions of dollars in medical debt, not with the sense that we can fix all debt this way, but that we can demonstrate the malleability, the artifice, and the immorality of the student, medical, and housing debt that is destroying so many lives. I know that the Occupy Homes foreclosure defenders have been doing amazing things, often one home at a time, from Atlanta to Minneapolis. (Last Friday, Occupy Our Homes organized a “showdown at the Department of Justice” in Washington, D.C.; that Saturday, Strike Debt Bay Area held their second Debtors' Assembly: undead from coast to coast.)

Fourth, I know people personally whose lives were changed, and who are doing work they never imagined they would be involved in, and I’m friends with remarkable people who, but for Occupy, I would not know existed. People connected across class, racial, and cultural lines in the flowering of that movement.  Like Freedom Summer, whose consequences were to be felt so far beyond Mississippi in 1964, this will have reach beyond the moment in which I write and you read.

Finally, there was great joy at the time, the joy of liberation and of solidarity, and joy is worth something in itself. In a sense, it’s worth everything, even if it’s always fleeting, though not always as scarce as we imagine.  MORE

tags: rebecca solnit, ows, tomdispatch | permalink | Show/Add Comments

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Occupy Lives!

post by: Ray Duray  May 19, 2013

Occupy No Longer in Headlines But Activism Continues Nationwide

David Swanson: Activists succeeding in turning public opinion against drone strikes; other forms of actions on the rise -

Transcript

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Sen. Eliz. Warren: A People's Champion

post by: Ray Duray  May 19, 2013

Elizabeth Warren Is Turning Out as Good as Promised

Elizabeth Warren does great email. One payoff of my pittance of a contribution to her grass-roots funded campaign—I regret not contributing more—is that I am regularly alerted by the new Massachusetts senator to the favoritism of our Congress toward Wall Street.

That’s how I was reminded this week that Congress is about to let the interest rate charged for new student loans double to 6.8 percent at a time when the too-big-to-fail banks that caused the Great Recession continue to be bailed out at the rate of 0.75 percent. Yes, the banks pay less than 1 percent for money that we the taxpayers lend them. I know that such statistics are thought to be boring, but as Warren explained, the rate that students will have to pay “is nine times higher than the rate at which the government loans money to the big banks.”

The student loan interest rate that had been temporarily cut in half back in 2007 was once again set to double, but instead of pushing for the status quo as Congress did last year, Warren has upped the ante with legislation that would cut the student loan rate way down to the near zero that the big banks enjoy. As Warren put it in her characteristically no bull style:MORE

tags: senator elizabeth warren, robert scheer, truthdig | permalink | Show/Add Comments

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HFT: Now This Is Insane

post by: Ray Duray  May 19, 2013

Ian Fraser: The beauty and insanity of HFT

What has become of our markets? Nanex, the market analysis firm, has animated a half second of trading activity in Johnson & Johnson stock. The animation is both intoxicating and mindblowing, not only because of the sheer quantity of trades, each of which is made by computer algorithms (i.e. without human intervention) in such a miniscule timespan, but also because of the tremendous scope that high-frequency trading creates for what Nanex calls “abusive behaviour” — including arbitrage and market manipulation — and systemic risk.

The video illustrates an actual half second of trading in J&J stock from May 2nd, 2013, slowed down so it takes five minutes to watch. In the video each box represents a stock exchange. As Time magazine explained in an article last year (“Wall Street’s Doomsday Machine“) high frequency trading has nothing to do with the efficient allocation of capital, and everything to do with socially-useless proprietary trading that runs counter to the interests of long-term investors:-   MORE

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Leaking Contests: DoJ v. AP

post by: Ray Duray  May 18, 2013

Many of you have probably been as baffled as I have been about what the AP phone scandal was really all about. Here's the best explanation I've seen so far.

DOJ to press: “If you preempt my ability to spin out a story the way I want to, I’m going to ruin your source base" - Marcy Wheeler on Scott Horton Show

Select quote:

Horton: Mmhmm. So – I don’t really get it. So the White House got really upset that these reporters revealed their sort of pseudo-bogus sting – was it, what was the point? They wanted to make a big orange alert out of it, it sounds like, but then you say it was Brennan himself, Obama’s counter-terrorism czar, now the head of the CIA, right, who undermined, you know, just what a big deal it was, that they had stopped something that was a real threat. He said, “Oh, it wasn’t a real threat. It was a put-up job by us.”

Wheeler: Yeah, and you know I think – and I did a post on this last year, looking – because they did do, the White House did do a big dog and pony show to announce the thwarted toner cartridge plot, and we have every reason to expect they would have done precisely the same thing last year Horton:when this, you know, quote quote underwear bomb plot was quote unquote thwarted. That’s what they wanted to do. They wanted to get the news cycle. They wanted to be able to spin this out the way they wanted –

Horton: And then later they chose to downplay it.

Wheeler: – and that’s all the AP prevented them from doing. That’s it.

tags: ap, doj, eric holder, underwear bomber | permalink | Show/Add Comments

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