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Robert Reich has a Christmas message for US.
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Ninety-five percent of economic gains since 2009 have gone to the 1 percent. We have a moral obligation to fix this.
It’s the season to show concern for the less fortunate among us. We should also be concerned about the widening gap between the most fortunate and everyone else.
the biggest lottery of all is what family we’re born into. Our life chances are now determined to an unprecedented degree by the wealth of our parents.
That’s not always been the case. The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches – with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone – was once at the core of the American Dream.
And equal opportunity was the heart of the American creed. Although imperfectly achieved, that ideal eventually propelled us to overcome legalized segregation by race, and to guarantee civil rights. It fueled efforts to improve all our schools and widen access to higher education. It pushed the nation to help the unemployed, raise the minimum wage, and provide pathways to good jobs. Much of this was financed by taxes on the most fortunate.
But for more than three decades we’ve been going backwards. It’s far more difficult today for a child from a poor family to become a middle-class or wealthy adult. Or even for a middle-class child to become wealthy.
The major reason is widening inequality. The longer the ladder, the harder the climb. America is now more unequal that it’s been for eighty or more years, with the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of all developed nations. Equal opportunity has become a pipe dream.
Rather than respond with policies to reverse the trend and get us back on the road to equal opportunity and widely-shared prosperity, we’ve spent much of the last three decades doing the opposite.
Taxes have been cut on the rich, public schools have deteriorated, higher education has become unaffordable for many, safety nets have been shredded, and the minimum wage has been allowed to drop 30 percent below where it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.
Congress has just passed a tiny bipartisan budget agreement, and the Federal Reserve has decided to wean the economy off artificially low interest rates. Both decisions reflect Washington’s (and Wall Street’s) assumption that the economy is almost back on track.
But it’s not at all back on the track it was on more than three decades ago.
It’s certainly not on track for the record 4 million Americans now unemployed for more than six months, or for the unprecedented 20 million American children in poverty (we now have the highest rate of child poverty of all developed nations other than Romania), or for the third of all working Americans whose jobs are now part-time or temporary, or for the majority of Americans whose real wages continue to drop.
How can the economy be back on track when 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the richest 1 percent?
The underlying issue is a moral one: What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
Well, we could have asked Ronald Reagan (see link below) when he started the nonsense of nobody-at-the-top-owing-anyone-below-anything meme (remember the so-popular "welfare queens in their cadillacs") in order to benefit his wealthy backers' plans . . . but no one in the media ever did (successfully).
How America Abandoned Its “Undeserving” Poor
With poverty on the rise in the late 1970s, Reagan conservatives waged war on the needy — and won
I've read many of George Orwell's works, including his poetry, because he was not only a truly gifted writer (and thinker par excellence), but he wrote in many differing genres that provide a wide landscape of information about the man who tried to alert his fellow citizens to the dangers inherent in the rise of the totalitarians after Hitler (and before).
Not much has changed since Orwell's time. Some think we've finally arrived at the proper recognition of how Orwell's vision of "1984" enwrapped us internationally under the cloak of "national security." Pigs rule. People are "terrorized."
Presenting the Orwellian sounding “Liberty and Security in a Changing World” report created for the Obama administration in the wake of the Edward Snowden psyop by a small group of hand-picked advisers including Cass Sunstein, Richard Clarke and Michael Joseph Morell.
The actual report was released early by the Obama administration. They released it today. It’s full of lofty sounding rhetoric, like Obama’s speeches. However, as in his speeches, if you ignore the lip-service he’s paying to his dwindling base and pay close attention to the detail while keep(ing) it in context of other current events, you should get a pretty good picture of what is happening and who is going to benefit from it.
It’s not you by the way who will benefit nor your privacy as they privatize bulk data collection and reserve the right for them to refuse to disclose anything if it hampers that all important “national security” thing they got going.
The New York Times Reminds Us the NSA Still Warrantlessly Wiretaps Americans, and Congress Has the Power to Stop It
By Trevor Timm: Last week, the New York Timespublished two important op-eds highlighting how the National Security Agency (NSA) has retained expansive powers to warrantlessly wiretap Americans after Congress ...
And lately:
“Almost Orwellian” – that’s the description a federal judge gave earlier this week to the massive spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on virtually all 380 million cellphones in the United States.
In the first meaningful and jurisdictionally grounded judicial review of the NSA cellphone spying program, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee sitting in Washington, D.C., ruled that the scheme of asking a secret judge on a secret court for a general warrant to spy on all American cellphone users without providing evidence of probable cause of criminal behavior against any of them is unconstitutional because it directly violates the Fourth Amendment.
. . . The Framers intended (the Fourth Amendment) to prevent the new government in America from doing to Americans what the British government had done to the colonists under the king.
The British government had used general warrants – which are not based on individualized probable cause and do not name the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized – to authorize British soldiers to search the colonists wherever they pleased for whatever they wished to seize. The reason for the Fourth Amendment requirement of individualized probable cause and specificity in the warrant is to prevent the very type of general warrant that the NSA has claimed is lawful. The reason for preventing general warrants is that they have become an instrument of tyranny.
The following paragraphs are a perfect lead-in to the essay below on the latest Cass Sunstein runaround.
Just in case you needed to get even more exercise(d).
Has Morley Safer Ever Told John Miller This Story?: 'Look, If You Think Any American Official Is Going to Tell You the Truth, Then You're Stupid'
Everyone who watched the 60 Minutes segment on the NSA should follow it up with this story involving Morley Safer — who, at 82 years old, is still a correspondent at 60 Minutes:
In August, 1965 Safer appeared in what became one of most famous TV segments of the Vietnam War, showing U.S. troops setting fire to all the huts in a Vietnamese village with Zippo lighters and flamethrowers.
A year later in 1966, Safer wrote an article about what he'd seen first hand during a visit to Vietnam by Arthur Sylvester, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (i.e., the head of Pentagon PR). Sylvester met at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon with reporters for U.S. news outlets:
There was general opening banter, which Sylvester quickly brushed aside. He seemed anxious to take a stand — to say something that would jar us. He said:
"I can't understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here," he began. Then he went on to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good.
A network television correspondent said, "Surely, Arthur, you don't expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government."
"That's exactly what I expect," came the reply.
An agency man raised the problem that had preoccupied Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and Barry Zorthian — about the credibility of American officials. Responded the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:
"Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid. Did you hear that? — stupid."
One of the most respected of all the newsmen in Vietnam — a veteran of World War II, the Indochina War and Korea — suggested that Sylvester was being deliberately provocative. Sylvester replied:"Look, I don't even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States."At this point, the Hon. Arthur Sylvester put his thumbs in his ears, bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue and wiggled his fingers.
And speaking of Orwell and the term Orwellian . . . (it almost makes me think none of these people ever took a history (let alone, English) course), think back to the revelations about our own Soviet-throwback, apocrypha-laden, wise man/guy, "noted thinker" Cass Sunstein. Wonder where he's been and who's been paying him ever since?
He's not out of D.C., and has never left the fray.
And he's been deeply engaged at work turning out the latest Obama newspeak errr - recommendations for handling the NSA Snowjob blowback. And it won't blow back on them if these "recommendations" become the received knowledge.
The Cass Sunstein-Led Group Report Recommendations (PDF)
Posted on December 18, 2013 by willyloman
by Scott Creighton
Presenting the Orwellian sounding “Liberty and Security in a Changing World” report created for the Obama administration in the wake of the Edward Snowden psyop by a small group of hand picked advisers including Cass Sunstein, Richard Clarke and Michael Joseph Morell.
(Please read: Cass Sunstein and CIA Director at Time of the Leak are the Advisers Fixing the “Crisis” Caused by Snowden Psyop )
The actual report was released early by the Obama administration. They released it today. It’s full of lofty sounding rhetoric, like Obama’s speeches. However, as in his speeches, if you ignore the lip-service he’s paying to his dwindling base and pay close attention to the detail while keep it in context of other current events, you should get a pretty good picture of what is happening and who is going to benefit from it.
It’s not you by the way who will benefit nor your privacy as they privatize bulk data collection and reserve the right for them to refuse to disclose anything if it hampers that all important “national security” thing they got going.
“In addition, the panel proposed terminating the NSA’s ability to store telephone data and instead require it to be held by the phone companies or a third party.” AP
Yes, it would seem that the privatization of bulk data collection is the main focus of the Sunstein group report. Obviously this will turn all that “metadata” (and the other forms of data they expressly discuss (recording and transcripts of emails, texts, etc.) into a commodity, wholly owned by the various companies that collect it such as AT&T, Verizon, Google, and others
“With respect to surveillance of US Persons, we recommend a series of significant reforms. Under section 215 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the government now stores bulk telephony metadata, understood as information that includes the telephone numbers that both originate and receive calls, time of call, and date of call. (Meta-data does not include the content of calls.). We recommend that Congress should end such storage and transition to a system in which such metadata is held privately for the government to query when necessary for national security purposes“
“Recommendation 4 : We recommend that, as a general rule, and without senior policy review, the government should not be permitted to collect and store all mass, undigested, non-public personal information about individuals to enable future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes. Any program involving government collection or storage of such data must be narrowly tailored to serve an important government interest.”
Recommendation 5 : We recommend that legislation should be enacted that terminates the storage of bulk telephony meta-data by the government under section 215, and transitions as soon as reasonably possible to a system in which such meta-data is held instead either by private providers or by a private third party. Access to such data should be permitted only with a section 215 order from the Foreign Intellience Surveillance Court that meets the requirements set forth in Recommendation 1″ As you can see from recommendation 4 and 5, these are two different categories of data being collected. “Undigested, non-public, personal information” is one category and “telephony meta-data” is another. Meta-data would certainly be processed or “digested”. What wouldn’t be would be actually recordings of calls or email transcripts. It’s unclear as too what justification the government would need to collect and store such information that would be “narrowly tailored” for some “government interest”
And lets not forget this recent gem:
“In their most concerted response yet to disclosures by the National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter and AOL have published an open letter to Barack Obama and Congress on Monday, throwing their weight behind radical reforms already proposed by Washington politicians.” The GuardianWhy is it that these companies are so determined to see something like this enacted? Who do you think will be collecting, storing and commodifying all that data?
Can you say “the next bubble crisis”? Can you say “new derivatives markets”?
As too all that “transparency” they are beaming about on other news services. Don’t bet on it.
There is a recommendation which deals explicitly with provisions which would enable the government to ignore requests to see what information is being collected and for what reasons.
Recommendation 8: We recommend that: (1) legislation should be enacted providing that, in the use of National Security Letters, section 215 orders, pen register and trap-and-trace orders, 702 orders, and similar orders directing individuals, businesses, or other institutions to turn over information to the government, non-disclosure orders may be issued only upon a judicial finding that there are reasonable grounds to believe that disclosure would significantly threaten the national security, interfere with an ongoing investigation, endanger the life or physical safety of any person, impair diplomatic relations, or put at risk some other similarly weighty government or foreign intelligence interest;”I think the only crime not covered under that all inclusive rubric would be one involving a kid shoplifting candy from a 7-11. But don’t hold me too that.
Basically what this allows for is the government to keep massive amounts of bulk data collections secret for any number of BS reasons they feel they can come up with. So there goes your transparency. All they have to say is they are collecting mass amounts of data on folks and they can’t disclose what and who because it might threaten their ongoing investigation and thus cause a risk to our “national security”
Of they can simply say they can’t disclose the data mining because it might impair our relationship with a foreign country . . . like Israel for example.
Whatever the lame excuse, transparency is not a given here. But don’t worry, Big Brother’s highest Party Members will be making the decisions and you can trust them… right?
Recommendation 11 – We recommend that the decision to keep secret from the American people programs of the magnitude of the section 215 bulk telephony meta-data program should be made only after careful deliberation at high levels of government and only with due consideration of and respect for the strong presumption of transparency that is central to democratic governance. A program of this magnitude should be kept secret from the American people only if (a) the program serves a compelling governmental interest and (b) the efficacy of the program would be substantially impaired if our enemies were to know of its existence”See? They can keep all this secret from you if it serves a “compelling interest” of the people doing it.
There’s about 29 or so more recommendations from this Sunstein group that they claim are in response to the Snowjob affair which I suggest people read on their own. The group’s recommendations are not written in stone and they will certainly be modified in the next couple of weeks as the new CISPA is molded and shaped in the wake of the Greenwald snowjob.
Other fronts are being employed to this endeavor.
The same guy who wrote the Patriot Act has written another Orwellian sounding piece of legislation called the “USA Freedom Act”. They got the ACLU behind that sale’s pitch.
And of course, Jay Rockefeller (yes, of THOSE Rockefellers) has attached a rider to the new NDAA 2014 bill:
“Jay Rockefeller (D WVA) has attached a cyber-security amendment (I attached it below) to the NDAA 2014 bill in Congress to mandate that precautions be taken to protect America’s cyber infrastructure and private entities. Those of us who represent private entities, will soon find our free access to the internet eliminated. The fact that this internet control bill is attached to the NDAA is no accident because this means that dissidents, posting anti-government rhetoric on the internet, can be snatched off the street and held indefinitely for their “terrorist” views.” Blacklisted NewsYou can download and read the “Liberty and Security in a Changing World” report for yourself.
2013-12-12_rg_final_report
Comments:
brian, on December 19, 2013 at 4:50 am said:
Thinking of the logistics to all of this (of which I am certainly no expert) I just wonder if these proposals reflect what has been going on all along…
. . . compare this from above ¨(…) Yes, it would seem that the privatization of bulk data collection is the main focus of the Sunstein group report. Obviously this will turn all that “metadata” (and the other forms of data they expressly discuss (recording and transcripts of emails, texts, etc.) into a commodity, wholly owned by the various companies that collect it such as AT&T, Verizon, Google, and others.¨
. . . with this: ¨Surveillance State is the inevitable development of a corporate-controlled Internet. Today some 70% of the NSA budget goes to corporations, which routinely implement computer programs that are hidden from the public as “proprietary information.” It’s not much of a jump from privatized and hidden corporate systems to privatized and hidden state surveillance systems.¨http://www.dailycensored.com/digital-deformation/
What I mean is the tools are certainly already in private hands where no bulk data would have to be turned over really but just be kept in place, safeguarded and finalized by legalese.
It looks like this time the NSA is just a front for the corporates using their mantra of the ¨War on terror¨. Wouldn’t be surprised if at NSA HQ all they did was mopping floors.
willyloman, on December 19, 2013 at 8:19 am said:
It’s been privatized to an extent for a long time I would imagine. The collection of the data that is. Tice (I think it was him) told us how he installed routing lines into a special room on behalf of AT&T (I think it was) years ago (2006?)
The difference I think is that the “meta-data” will be collected, stored, processed, sifted through, flagged for further actions and eventually even marketed by these companies. Thin(k) about the sheer size of this pool of data and what it could be used for other than “national security”
Well, naturally, with the laws as they are, they can’t do that now legally and therefore they can’t create derivatives and CDS with it because legally they don’t have it and don’t own it.
So does the primary drive of all of the big Snowden game boil down to legalizing the packaging up different combinations of personal data and personal histories into new financial instruments to be gambled on like mortgages? How much does the Non-Sense Agency really have to do with this effort compared to the financial/corporate industry? Remember about ten years ago when there was a DARPA – sponsored effort to start a terrorism futures market to help “predict political upheaval in the Middle East”?
http://www.derivativeworks.com/2006/12/policy_analysis.html http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3072985/t/pentagon-kills-terror-futures-market/
Of course, DARPA scrapped the project because of its obvious potential for embarrassment. What may not have been as widely publicized is that the directors at DARPA got worried and had program managers bring any funded effort with a potentially sensitive name before them for “review”. All of them were immediately terminated without review (because that’s easier than evaluating I suppose) to be on the safe side and avoid scandal.
People and groups with projects both questionable and useful lost their funding with no recourse. While some of this may not have been bad (except for legitimate programs being canceled without review), I’m afraid many projects get funded as arbitrarily and with as little review as these got cancelled.
Remember MKUltra? It was “cancelled” because after becoming the biggest budget for the entire Corporate Infrastructure Agency, nobody could even track where the money was going!
Winston(K) Smith, on December 19, 2013 at 10:41 am said:
Something that is probably relevant to this discussion: The GAO has just put out a short report called “INFORMATION RESELLERS Consumer Privacy Framework Needs to Reflect Changes in Technology and the Marketplace” addressed to Rockefeller as the chairman of Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation:
http://cryptome.org/2013/12/gao-14-251t.pdf
Talk about regulation (mostly lack thereof) of third-party resellers of bulk personal data.
Warning: There’s an embedded document in it called GAO-v9.joboptions – I have no idea what it is or if it’s a problem – probably not, but just an FYI.
As if you need any more data about how we're manipulated by the banksters and their minions, there's always DealBreaker's rare insights:
16 Dec 2013
Former UBS Banker-cum-Fugitive Will Probably Starting Naming Tax Evading Names: Guy
By Bess Levin
Raoul Weil, the former head of UBS AG’s global wealth management business accused of conspiring to help Americans evade taxes, was ordered to post bail of $10.5 million before trial, according to a court filing. Weil, 54, appeared today in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the first time since he was indicted in October 2008 and declared a fugitive. U.S. Magistrate Judge Patrick Hunt said Weil must post a $9 million personal surety bond with a cash deposit of $4 million, as well as a $1 million corporate surety bond and a $500,000 personal surety bond, according to minutes of the hearing.
Weil’s lawyer has said he is innocent. He is the highest-ranking banker among about 100 people charged since 2008 by the U.S. in a crackdown on offshore tax evasion. About three dozen foreign bankers, lawyers and advisers were charged. Tax lawyers not involved in the case said they expect Weil to plead guilty, cooperate with prosecutors, and seek leniency at sentencing. “There’s a good chance he’ll be ready to cooperate, and he’ll be throwing his people under the bus,” said attorney Edward Robbins of Hochman, Salkin, Rettig, Toscher & Perez in Beverly Hills, California. “He knows where all the dead bodies are. To the extent that the government missed any, he can tell them where they are.” [Bloomberg]
Christmas Come Early For JP Morgan Junior Employees
by Bess Levin | December 16, 2013
Back in the day, as in pre-2008, attempts to make the job of a Wall Street junior banker slightly more palatable would have been laughed off as crazy and unnecessary. The main reason was that any complaints to management about treating young employees like indentured servants could be met with: “Yeah . . .but you’re/they’re making a ridiculous . . .
Read more »
Instead of helping homeowners as promised under agreements with the U.S. Treasury Department, Bank of America stalled them with repeated requests for paperwork and incorrect income calculations, according to nine former Urban Lending employees. Some borrowers were sent into foreclosure or pricier loan modifications padded with fees resulting from the delays, according to the people, all but two of whom asked to remain anonymous because they signed confidentiality agreements.
HAMP was the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s attempt to prevent foreclosures by lowering distressed borrowers’ mortgage payments. Under the program, homeowners are given trial modifications to prove they can make reduced payments before the changes become permanent.
The accounts of the former employees help explain why Obama’s plan fell far short of the 3 million averted foreclosures targeted in 2009. Relying on the same industry that sold shoddy mortgages during the housing bubble and improperly sped foreclosures afterward, HAMP resulted in still-active modifications for 905,663 homeowners as of the end of August, or 13 percent of the 6.9 million people who applied.Secret Inside BofA Office of CEO Stymied Needy Homeowners [Bloomberg]
Isabel Santamaria thought she finally caught a break in her effort to save her Florida home from foreclosure after nine frustrating months: She reached Bank of America Corp.’s Office of the CEO and President.
What the mother of two autistic children didn’t know is that her case would find its way to contractors, including Urban Lending Solutions in Broomfield, Colorado, far from the bank’s headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. Bank of America hired the firm founded by Chuck Sanders, a former Pittsburgh Steelers running back, to clear a backlog of complaints about a federal program designed to prevent foreclosures.
“It felt like a big deal, reaching the CEO’s office,” Santamaria, 43, said of having her June 2010 call escalated to what she was told was the bank’s top level. “It only happened because I complained to my congressman, the attorney general, television stations. They only put you there if you make a big stink, but once you’re there, they still don’t help you.”
Bank of America, led by Chief Executive Officer Brian T. Moynihan, faced more than 15,000 complaints in 2010 from its role in the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program. Urban Lending, one of the vendors brought in to handle grievances from lawmakers and regulators on behalf of borrowers, also operated a mail-processing center for HAMP documents.
Paperwork Requests
Instead of helping homeowners as promised under agreements with the U.S. Treasury Department, Bank of America stalled them with repeated requests for paperwork and incorrect income calculations, according to nine former Urban Lending employees. Some borrowers were sent into foreclosure or pricier loan modifications padded with fees resulting from the delays, according to the people, all but two of whom asked to remain anonymous because they signed confidentiality agreements.
Countrywide Managers
Bank of America stands out in a program that lawmakers and former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair have called a failure, leaving many homeowners worse off. The second-largest U.S. lender canceled more trial modifications than any mortgage firm and sent the highest percentage of rejected customers into foreclosure, Treasury data show.
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