July 1, 2013

An open letter to Rep. Alan Grayson and any representatives of the people

of the United States of America who may happen to view this. And thank you to any of your aids to bring it to your attention and do the good work.

Please create and pass legislation creating checks and balances within US politics to immediately remove from office any who are working directly for corporations and billionaires, or who have direct ties to such, or who have taken lobby money from such or who have lobbied or worked for such. And/or other means and measures to eliminate from politics those who are actively voting on behalf of corporate and financial interests.

This means "tea party" politicians. Note that the Koch brothers co-created the "tea party" with big tobacco, to push Koch-friendly legislation.

Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaire Koch Brothers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-demelle/study-confirms-tea-party-_b_2663125.html

Rick Snyder, Rick Scott, Scott Walker. All must go before they destroy their respective states with Koch-derived vulture capitalism legislation.

This also means standing corporate personas such as Michael Taylor, a Monsanto executive who is now the Deputy Commissioner for Foods at the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

This means Penny Pritzker, a billionaire with a history of abusing worker's rights, now appointed by Obama to the position of Commerce Secretary.

This means Clarence Thomas, once a Monsanto attorney who is now on the Supreme Court, refusing to recuse himself from Monsanto cases.

The conflicts of interest, the stunning amount of corporate and plutonomist theft of our political system which is supposed to represent the people of the country, is beyond belief. It must be stopped immediately and immediately removed. The possibility of their increasing their numbers in the next election, through means such as the Koch brothers derived "citizens united" PAC ruling by the Supreme Court, is abomination.

Return the country to its people. And please do something about the corporate income inequality as well:

Make it illegal for corporations to write legislation, or for any level of government to accept corporate-derived legislation (ALEC, TPP, etc.)

I don't ask much. Even a single victory derived from this list would be a massive improvement. Thank you for your service. Sorry for asking you and those who serve the country to be some sort of Santa Claus, but Change must come. The trend is too frightening, too visible, to bear. You know that if the people of this country have to march again en mass, the rich will call the riot police to be even worse, that we may get the message to stay home and shut up. Can we avoid this scenario through political action and channels or is it inevitable? Thank you very much.

July 1, 2013

Walmart settles fake reporter saga

Warehouse Workers ?@wwunited

#Walmart settles its "fake reporter" saga. http://ow.ly/myNHP #WMTfail #labor @LaloAlcaraz @paulxharris @alicehines


http://www.warehouseworkersunited.org/walmart-settles-fake-reporter-saga/

Walmart and its PR firm agreed not to engage in illegal surveillance of workers.

In a settlement made public today Walmart and Mercury Public Affairs agreed to destroy any recordings made at a press conference last year that was co-sponsored by Warehouse Workers United and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. The companies settled to avoid a trial after federal authorities investigated and authorized a complaint over a federal charge filed by Warehouse Workers United.

At the June 2012 press conference, warehouse worker Santos Castaneda was interviewed by a Mercury Public Affairs staffer posing as a student journalist. The public relations agent said her name was Zoe Mitchell and that she was a journalism student at the University of Southern California. The next week, the same woman appeared at a press event in front of the proposed location for a Walmart in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. This time she used her real identity, Stephanie Harnett, and said she was representing Walmart.

snip

“Walmart has a lot of tricks up its sleeves,” Castaneda said. “I’m glad we caught them this time.”

(Links and a little more at the page.)

July 1, 2013

The cyber-intelligence complex and its useful idiots

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/01/cyber-intelligence-complex-useful-idiots

Those who tell us to trust the US's secret, privatised surveillance schemes should recall the criminality of J Edgar Hoover's FBI

Besides, the government to which we're ceding these broad new powers is a democracy, overseen by real, live Americans. And it's hard to imagine American government officials abusing their powers – or at least, it would be, had such officials not already abused similar but more limited powers through repeated campaigns of disinformation, intimidation and airtight crimes directed at the American public over the last five decades. Cointelpro, Operation Mockingbird, Ultra and Chaos are among the now-acknowledged CIA, FBI and NSA programs by which those agencies managed to subvert American democracy with impunity. Supporters of mass surveillance conducted under the very same agencies have yet to address how such abuses can be insured against in the context of powers far greater than anything J Edgar Hoover could command.

Many have never heard of these programs; the sort of people who trust states with secret authority tend not to know what such things have led to in the recent past. Those who do know of such things may perhaps contend that these practices would never be repeated today. But it was just two years ago that the late Michael Hastings revealed that US army officials in Afghanistan were conducting psy-ops against visiting US senators in order to sway them towards continued funding for that unsuccessful war. If military and intelligence officials have so little respect for the civilian leadership, one can guess how they feel about mere civilians.

snip

And so they do. If we want to learn a thing or two about the latest round of such programs – that is, if we are willing to disregard the Thomas Friedmans of this world – we must look not just towards the three letter agencies that have routinely betrayed us in the past, but also to the untold number of private intelligence contracting firms that have sprung up lately in order to betray us in a more efficient and market-oriented manner. Our lieutenant colonel, scourge of "public eyes", is among the many ex-military and intelligence officials who have left public service, or public obfuscation – or whatever we're calling it now – to work in the expanding sphere of private spookery, to which is outsourced information operations by the Pentagon, spy agencies, and even other corporations who need an edge over some enemy (in Crawford's case, the mysterious Archimedes Global).

(More at the link. Note that this is by Barrett Brown, who is currently being imprisoned by the state for being an Anonymous supporter.)

July 1, 2013

The Snowden / Hammond leaks are the only way we know about modern equivalents of Cointelpro

Occupy Wall Street ?@OccupyWallSt

The #Snowden / #Hammond leaks are the only way we know about modern equivalents of Cointelpro ~ @BarrettBrownLOL

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/01/cyber-intelligence-complex-useful-idiots

July 1, 2013

I Want To Retrieve My NSA Records. Please Mail a Freedom of Information Act Request For Me

http://mynsarecords.com/

The NSA has been exposed as having collected the phone records of millions of Americans in blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment. What would you like them to do with your records?

My NSA Records lets you quickly and easily send a request to the NSA for them to provide you with a copy of the records they have collected regarding you -or- send a motion to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to ask them to direct the NSA to delete your records. We will print and mail your request for free.

July 1, 2013

Germany summons US ambassador over 'Cold War' spying leaks, French president demands US 'stop spying

http://rt.com/news/germany-summons-us-ambassador-leaks-476/

Germany has summoned the US ambassador to the Berlin Foreign Ministry over leaked reports of massive scale US spying on the EU. Chancellor Merkel said earlier that if the reports were confirmed it would be “unacceptable Cold War-style behavior.”

The spokesperson to German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the government wants “trust restored” following the reports.

"If it is confirmed that diplomatic representations of the European Union and individual European countries have been spied upon, we will clearly say that bugging friends is unacceptable," said spokesman Steffen Seibert.

"We are no longer in the Cold War," Seibert added.

(More at the link.)


For more reading:

Germans Loved Obama. Now We Don’t Trust Him.

"Given our history, we Germans are not willing to trade in our liberty for potentially better security."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023136859


---

RT ?@RT_com

BREAKING: French president Hollande demands US 'stop spying'
http://on.rt.com/8k3869

July 1, 2013

DARPA-funded study: The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1306/1306.5474.pdf

The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street
Michael D. Conover
*
, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini
Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America

Abstract

We examine the temporal evolution of digital communication activity relating to the American anti-capitalist movement
Occupy Wall Street. Using a high-volume sample from the microblogging site Twitter, we investigate changes in Occupy
participant engagement, interests, and social connectivity over a fifteen month period starting three months prior to the
movement’s first protest action. The results of this analysis indicate that, on Twitter, the Occupy movement tended to elicit
participation from a set of highly interconnected users with pre-existing interests in domestic politics and foreign social
movements. These users, while highly vocal in the months immediately following the birth of the movement, appear to
have lost interest in Occupy related communication over the remainder of the study period.

Citation:
Conover MD, Ferrara E, Menczer F, Flammini A (2013) The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street. PLoS ONE 8(5): e64679. doi:10.1371/
journal.pone.0064679
Editor:
Matjaz Perc, University of Maribor, Slovenia
Received
February 12, 2013;
Accepted
April 16, 2013;
Published
May 29, 2013
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise us
ed by anyone for
any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
Funding:
The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (grant CCF-1101743), the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) (grant W911NF-12-1-0037), and the McDonnell Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests:
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: midconov@indiana.edu

Introduction

Information communications technologies play a crucial role in
the development and persistence of many modern social move-
ments [1–3]. Among these, the American anti-capitalist movement
Occupy Wall Street (‘Occupy’) is remarkable for the prominent
role social media, and in particular Twitter, played in facilitating
communication among its participants [4,5]. Functioning as a
high-visibility forum in which adherents and prospective partic-
ipants could interact and share information, Twitter represented a
valuable resource for supporting the movement’s political and
social objectives. In time, however, activity on the platform
substantially diminished, mirroring the fading prominence of
protest action on the ground. In light of this decline, we seek to
understand more about the population from which Occupy drew
its support, and specifically whether these individuals exhibited
changes in behavior or social connectivity over the course of the
movement’s evolution.

The Twitter platform, like other information communication
technologies, has the potential to confer a number of benefits to
burgeoning social movements [6–8]. Chief among these is the
opportunity to connect individuals in service of the dual goals of
resource mobilization and collective framing [9]. These factors,
well studied in the social sciences literature, are critical to the
success of social movements. Resource mobilization refers to the
process whereby a social movement works to marshal the physical
and technological infrastructure, human resources, and financial
capital necessary to sustain its ongoing activity [10,11]. Collective
framing refers to the social processes whereby movement
participants negotiate the shared language and narrative frames
that help define the movement’s identity and goals [12,13].
In related work [9], we report on evidence that Occupy users
leveraged Twitter to communicate, at the local level, time-sensitive
information about protest and police action. We also find that
users relied on these channels to facilitate interstate communica-
tion relating to the news media and narrative frames such as ‘‘We
are the 99%,’’ suggesting that long-distance communication on
Twitter played a role in the collective framing processes that
imbue social movements with a shared language, purpose and
identity. This evidence indicates that Occupy participants used the
Twitter platform to address critical issues facing any burgeoning
social movement, and that during peak periods these streams were
rich with actionable, relevant information.

To establish the extent of Occupy participant engagement with
Twitter over time, here we study the total amount of Occupy-
related traffic on the platform from September 2011 through
September 2012. With respect to this measure of activity, we find
that Occupy traffic has diminished by orders of magnitude relative
to peak activity volumes in late 2011. This effect is evident even in
concerted attempts to revive the movement’s flagging levels of
engagement, with activity returning to baseline within a week of
May 1st, 2012 reoccupation efforts.

(More at the link. Remember DARPA and their 1.8 gigapixel camera drones?)

DARPA shows off 1.8-gigapixel surveillance drone, can spot a person from 20,000 feet
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12525227

I am very uncomfortable about this. This is spying.

July 1, 2013

Strike Debt Bay Area: Here's our full argument for opposing privatization of the USPS

Strike Debt Bay Area ?@StrikeDebtBA

Here's our full argument for opposing privatization of the USPS:
http://strike-debt-bay-area.tumblr.com/post/51987248526/privatization-is-social-cancer-saving-the-us-postal …


Privatization can be defined as the transferring of a business, agency, public service or property from the public/government sector, where the needs of the community are paramount, to the private/corporate sector, which exists solely for making a profit. This becomes a systemic problem when public welfare is falsely determined to be the outcome of corporate profitability. Those with money to invest look for the fastest return on their investments and neglect the long-term health of their communities. As public services are privatized, the price of those services increases, and profits multiply as enterprise capital is liquidated and real wages are cut. Privatization has made executive compensation go through the roof while public schools are shuttered, affordable housing is decimated, and health insurance claims are denied. The active agents of the 1% are infecting the vital organs of society and appropriating their nutrients. As communities are deprived of investment, they face two choices: either put up the community’s capital as loan collateral for continued public services, or lose the services altogether. Since the first choice is only a temporary solution, the second choice becomes inevitable, and the will to resist privatization weakens.

The USPS is a model for all essential public services

One public enterprise that has done an exemplary job of resisting privatization is the post office. This is because the USPS operates on a principle that all essential public services should follow: the Universal Service Obligation - to extend service so that everyone can use it and everyone can afford it. Instead of diverting profits to executive compensation packages and shareholder dividends, those profits have been used to extend mail service everywhere and to keep the price of postage stamps low.

Until 1980, the USPS received revenue enhancements for building new post offices to serve a growing population. In addition, the real cost of a first-class postage stamp decreased. But in 1970, Congress and President Richard Nixon lashed back at postal workers in retaliation for the Great Postal Strike of that same year with the Postal Reorganization Act. When Nixon signed the act into law he declared that henceforth the USPS should be “run like a business” and that revenue enhancements would be reduced to zero by 1976. For four years, minor supplements were paid but all funding stopped in 1980. Remarkably, it is the only agency of the US Government that has to raise all of its operating expenses. Nevertheless, with modest increases in postage fees and by consolidating operations, the post office continued to thrive without assistance. In 2006, however, the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act imposed a crushing burden on the postal service’s financial condition. Since that time, USPS ledgers have been in the red and they’ve had to liquidate their capital to pay the tribute. In 2011, to streamline this liquidation, the Postal Service’s Board of Governors signed a contract with CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate agency. The CBRE is now acts as agent in the sale of all USPS properties. It can be easily imagined that this is a sweet deal for CBRE, but here are some details to make its import more explicit:

(More at the link.)

July 1, 2013

Egypt VIDEOS: Huge blast by Muslim Brotherhood HQ during mega-protests; MB has been stormed

RT ?@RT_com

#Egypt VIDEO: Huge blast by Muslim Brotherhood HQ during mega-protests

║░V☮ice ✪f Turkey░║ ?@VOT99

VIDEO of Mursi's Brotherhood shooting Egyptians from their HQ windows in #Mokattam in Cairo



… #Tahrir #30June



AJELive ?@AJELive

BREAKING: Protesters storm Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Moqattam near #Cairo, #Egypt. More soon http://aje.me/17wFlXu



Anonymous Operations ?@Anon_Central

#Egypt-ian protesters occupy the burnt headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo | #July1 #Tahrir
pic.twitter.com/87VxOYkPEv via @57UN



Rapinder ?@RoadrunnerA

US Marines on stand-by to enter Egypt http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/28/out-of-precaution-marines-on-ready-to-go-to-egypt-to-protect-u-s-embassy-citizens/ … There are already three US warships in Red Sea that have 2000 marines aboard.

July 1, 2013

Egyptian protesters aiming lasers at a military helicopter