Target on your cyber back: DHS has a list of words deemed ‘suspicious’

The Department of Homeland Security has flagged hundreds of words as “suspect” – and while many make sense, like “Al Qaeda,” some are just plain odd. For example, the DHS may dig through your cyber life if you write something about snow. Or pork.

So, you’ve just come back from a beach holiday in Mexico and posted about it on your blog. Or maybe you’ve tweeted about skiing lessons? Updated your status, saying you’re stuck home with food poisoning?

All those things will tweak the DHS antennae, according to a manual published by the agency. The Analyst’s Desktop Binder, used by agency employees at their National Operations Center to identify “media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities,” includes hundreds of words that set off Big Brother’s silent alarms.

http://tinyurl.com/caqbj26

“Fusion Centers” Circumvent Laws Against Domestic Surveillance (Spying on Occupy)

If recent documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) are any indication, the Occupy Movement continues to be monitored and curtailed in a nationwide, federally-orchestrated campaign, spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

http://tinyurl.com/chaptcd

What if Glass-Steagall hadn’t been repealed?

As soon as the Great Crash hit, we were inundated with paid experts explaining to anyone who would listen that the repeal of Glass-Steagall did not cause the Great Crash. That went pretty well for the people who repealed Glass-Steagall, so now they started pushing the idea that Glass-Steagall would not have prevented banks from engaging in the activities that led to the Great Crash. We get a crash course from Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times Dealbook, who begins by blaming the left for perpetuating the meme that repeal led to the Great Crash.

Sorkin argues that you can look at each failed entity and see that it was never covered by Glass-Steagall, like Lehman or Bear Stearns or AIG; and that for banks, which once were covered by Glass-Steagall, the problem came from the commercial side, in the form of bad mortgage loans. That superficiality is the hallmark of the defenders of Wall Street. So let’s try to look a bit deeper.

The most important impact of Glass-Steagall is that it reduced the number of openings for investment bankers. If commercial banks couldn’t have investment banking arms, they would not have needed to hire investment bankers. There would not have been the crushing need to make gigantic profits off those people. There would not have been the enormous pressure to find ways to make money, including cutting corners and outright fraud. And there would have been fewer people trying to make themselves insanely rich with other people’s money, and at no risk to their personal finances.

http://tinyurl.com/7p2zt23

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/28/12” »

Austerity and ideology go hand-in-hand: Canada’s mass firing of ocean scientists brings ‘silent summer’

Canada is dismantling the nation’s entire ocean contaminants program as part of massive layoffs at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. [Chief researcher Peter] Ross told EHN that his main concern is the “wholesale axing of pollution research” that will leave Canada, and much of the world, without the scientific knowledge to protect whales, seals, fish and other marine life — as well as the indigenous peoples who rely on them for their traditional foods. Many scientists say the purpose of the move by the Canadian government is not just cost-cutting but to eliminate environmental rules and protect the oil and gas industry. The following is an essay that Ross wrote Thursday for EHN.
. . .

It is with deep regret that I relay news of my termination of employment at Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the loss of my dream job. It is with even greater sadness that I learn of the demise of DFO’s entire contaminants research program – regionally and nationally. It is with apprehension that I ponder a Canada without any research or monitoring capacity for pollution in our three oceans, or any ability to manage its impacts on commercial fish stocks, traditional foods for over 300,000 aboriginal people and marine wildlife.

Canada’s silence on these issues will be deafening this summer and beyond.

http://tinyurl.com/7hjpvlu

The US public school system is under attack

The US public school system, once a model for the world, is under sustained attack by the nation’s elites. Philadelphia, the latest casualty, is getting ready to sell off its schools – and their governance – to profiteers and snake-oil salesmen. We already know how this story ends.

The Philadelphia school system announced in late April that it was on the brink of insolvency and would be turned over to private operators, dissolving most remnants of democratic governance. Specifically, if the city’s leaders have their way, 64 of the city’s neighbourhood public schools will close over the next five years, and by 2017, 40 per cent of the city’s children will attend charter schools. These are are privately run schools that use public funds. Perhaps most disturbingly to those who value democracy and doubt the wisdom of corporate elites, the city will have no oversight of its own school system. Schools will instead be governed by “networks”, control of which will be auctioned off through a bidding process, and could be bestowed on anyone – including a CEO of a for-profit education company.

The situation in Philadelphia, which has received amazingly little attention from the national media in the US, offers a disturbing window onto what the US elite is planning for the rest of our public schools – disturbing because Philadelphia’s experience has already demonstrated that turning public education over to private entities will ultimately lead to its destruction.

http://tinyurl.com/7cfseoz

Inequality wasn’t the answer: in fact, it was our downfall

There is a popular argument, put forward by Ben Broadbent at the Bank of England among others, that the UK’s unprecedented levels of household debt don’t matter, and won’t hold back recovery, because they have been matched by a sharp increase in assets.

That sounds right if you think of homeowners matching their rising mortgages against rocketing house prices. But NIESR found that, in fact, it was overwhelmingly the poor doing the borrowing through this period while the rich were accumulating the assets. Over the decade to 2007, for example, the bottom 10% of households saw their incomes grow by 17% but their spending rise by 43%. As NIESR puts it: “Given only a minority of the poorest are homeowners paying off their mortgage, it is highly unlikely this was counterbalanced by an increase in housing wealth.”

Without this borrowing binge, it is likely that consumption would have collapsed, and with it growth. And because many poor families are now hamstrung by unpayable debts, demand may be held back for years. So it seems rising inequality does matter – economically, as well as politically.

And it is this history – of decades in which lavish rewards accrued to the few while everyone else papered over the cracks with debt – that could make austerity impossible to bear.

http://tinyurl.com/cwxn2a7

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/27/12” »

Understanding and respecting the reformist/revolutionary spectrum

It should be a common axiom in teachings and understanding around movement building that there is a spectrum of radicalness, and this spectrum is actually necessary for large scale and long term social change. But in the past decade social movements in Canada have practically disappeared this concept -in specific, labour leaders and leftist politicians bad mouthing and baiting anarchists and anti-capitalists, with pacifist activists chiming in along behind them.

This tension, is often couched in the contrast between ‘peaceful’ vs. ‘violent’ protesters, but is actually more about goals than tactics. There are the liberals and moderates, who push for conservative lawful means of action and there are the radicals and revolutionaries who push for immediate systemic changes often outside of or counter to the law. It’s the reformist/revolutionary spectrum. Both ends of the spectrum have overlapping goals but often come into conflict with each other over both the means and the ends of social struggles. Unfortunately, peaceful protest has become equated with lawfulness in ahistoric precedents. Somehow, moderates forget that the participants of the Civil Rights Movement, though devoutly pacifist, were considered radical extremists and menaces to society in their day. Lawfulness and peacefulness are not interchangeable words, and further, are often adversaries of each other.

http://tinyurl.com/6qy3vpq

The City as University: Occupy and the Future of Public Education

For quite a long time now, we precariously situated students and faculty in CUNY have been practicing the art of what Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls “poor theory”- “maximizing the possibilities inherent in the minimum… being extremely creative and experimental in order to survive.” Unable to isolate ourselves within the velvety quicksand of armchairs and seminar table solipsism, we have instead pursued a kind of crowd scholarship that jettisons “interest” for “involvement.” Discussions among crowds of people-in and out of assemblies, street marches, virtual forums, shared meals, space-transformations, and yes, even jail stints-have assembled critical lessons and experiences not yet valued by scholastic frameworks of singularly rendered knowledge. Thousands have co-authored this document itself.

We are engaged in a process of defending our educational and social futures from a threadbare past and present. US student debt has surpassed $1 trillion-a third of this debt is held by graduate students. Crippling tuition increases and education cuts in some cases triple tuition and erase whole departments. Meanwhile, our campuses become increasingly militarized. As recently spotlighted in UC-Davis and CUNY’s Baruch and Brooklyn Colleges, administrators unabashedly welcome the surveillance, intimidation, and brutal arrests of students and faculty who peacefully dissent. But after our pulses shudder from being followed by armed officers, after our indignation roils from reading lies that presidents and chancellors print about our political acts, and after our bruised bodies heal from being treated like enemy combatants on our own campuses, we gather in crowds again because we have no other choice.

http://tinyurl.com/clvsj34

Millennials, Activism and Race: A New Study

Politically active, young progressives most often find themselves in the work as a result of family influences. They aren’t having grand epiphanies at lectures by prominent people or even recruited heavily by their friends. Their understanding and commitments come from observing or experiencing daily struggle.

People active in Occupy and those active in community organizations are similarly disenchanted with the electoral system. Their frustration was less about the Obama administration than it was about the dysfunctionality of the electoral and legislative systems generally.

All our participants named a dominant doctrine of individualism as a critical barrier to progressive change, but people involved with Occupy had a more explicit critique of capitalism as a system than those involved in other organizations.

Most respondents felt the need to address the racial dimensions of inequality, but they both wanted to include other systems in that analysis, and had few tools with which to bring in race with any combination of other systems like class, gender and sexuality.

http://tinyurl.com/c846ynw

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/26/12” »