Wednesday, September 23, 2009
The One-Sided War on the Streets of Honduras
"They're the Only Ones Using Violence," Human Rights Leader Bertha Oliva Observes of the Coup Regime on Day Two of Zelaya's Return
By Jeremy Kryt
TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS, SEPTEMBER 22, 2009: Government forces attacked a peaceful crowd outside the Brazilian Embassy Tuesday morning, in an apparent attempt to dispel support for deposed President Mel Zelaya. Mr. Zelaya had returned to the country on Monday after almost three months in exile.
 Mel Zelaya addresses a crowd of thousands in front of Brazilian Embassy on Monday. D.R. 2009, Jeremy Kryt. |
Eye-witness testimony indicated that the soldiers and police fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and live rounds into the crowd.
"It was brutal," said resistance organizer Juan Barahona, director of El Bloque Popular. "I was outside the embassy when the police began their dispersal. Afterwards we reorganized, and marched through some of the poor barrios. But the police attacked us there as well."
The day before, thousands had gathered in front of the Brazilian Consulate in the Colonia Palmira, to welcome home Mr. Zelaya with chanting and songs. The de facto government imposed a curfew starting at four p.m., and cut power to the Embassy; but Zelaya's supporters stayed on in the streets all night long, defying orders to disperse.
This reporter spent most of Monday inside the embassy with Mr. Zelaya. The ousted President addressed the thousands gathered outside, urging them to pursue a nonviolent resistance to "Los Golpistas."
"We will continue the struggle for democracy," said Zelaya, as the crowd voiced their desire for a new constitution. "This time I won't be caught napping," joked Zelaya, referring to the episode on June 28, when the military accosted him in his pajamas.
Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine
The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, Dead Hand.
By Nicholas Thompson
Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It's March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.
"The Perimeter system is very, very nice," he says. "We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military." He looks around again.
Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.
Chart source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
Natural Resources Defense Council
The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.
The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won't discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they've never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. "I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that." They weren't.
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand?currentPage=all
House on fire
by Mark in Santa Rosa
My own thoughts on the subject suggest that there's no real intent among Dems to actually implement ANY policy or program which might somehow infringe on corporate profit. There's a ROLE to be played, rhetoric to be repeated. The masses need to be placated.
I KNOW - without question - that politicians understand what most "Joe Six-pack" Americans want because they know what to promise on the campaign trail. I believe I understand enough about the technical workings of Congress to know that the party in power can pretty much do what it wants to do - most especially when the party in power also controls the White House.
To me, that means we COULD have had reform for Wall Street. We COULD have ended evil george's wars. We COULD have restored this to a nation of laws. We COULD have repealed evil george's tax cuts for the rich and made Social Security solvent. We COULD simply open Medicare to all Americans. Many of those things COULD have been done by now. No, not all of them, at least not completely. But by now, it SHOULD look as though we're heading in the right direction.
So if I can easily win a fight but I don't, what does that mean? I think it means I chose not to. It's like when I wrestle with my four-year-old grandson. I put on a good show - play the role. I tell him I'm going to win this time - repeat the rhetoric. It LOOKS (to him) like I'm trying to pin him. HE thinks he "won" - hey, he's four. But the truth is, if for some reason I felt it was in my own best interest to pin him, I could do so without effort. I think this quote from Douglas Adams sums it up nicely, even though Adams is ostensibly writing about the President of the Galaxy:
"The President in particular is very much a figurehead - he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe
His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.
Justice for True Patriots
Yesterday, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) introduced the Justice Act, which would provide much-needed fixes to the three provisions of the Patriot Act that expire at the end of this year. This is good news, because on Tuesday the Department of Justice said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) (PDF) that it was open to reforming parts of the Patriot Act. We're going to hold you to that, DOJ!
Earlier this year, the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office released a report, called Reclaiming Patriotism (PDF), that details the parts of the Patriot Act that need fixing most. Since the 38-page report isn't exactly light fare, we'll sum up the must-know parts for the upcoming Patriot Act debate:
First, the three provisions that will expire at the end of the year:
- Section 206, a.k.a. the "roving wiretap" provision: Section 206 allows the FBI to get an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to wiretap a target without having to provide the target's name or even their phone number. The provision only requires that the target is described "with particularity," and that the FBI tell FISC why it had to tap the phone after it was tapped. It basically lacks any kind of specificity that, you know, a real warrant would need.
- Section 6001, a.k.a. the "lone wolf" provision of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA): Section 6001 authorizes the government to get secret surveillance orders against individuals who are not associated with any international terrorist group or foreign nation. As the report points out, an international terrorist acting independently of any organization or country is pretty pie-in-the-sky unlikely.
- Section 215, a.k.a. the "library provision": The term "any tangible thing" should raise your hackles. Like the previous two provisions, Section 215 also lowers the bar on the standard of proof needed to get a court order to surveill. Before the Patriot Act was passed, probable cause showing that the target of surveillance was the agent of a foreign power was required. After Patriot, Section 215 allows the FBI to only claim that the items or information sought is relevant to an investigation. That means the person being surveilled doesn't necessarily have to be the target of the investigation or even be suspected of involvement in terrorism.
The ACLU is also concerned about provisions of the Patriot Act that are not expiring, but which would be amended under Sen. Feingold's bill. For example, the National Security Letter statute, which permits the FBI to secretly demand sensitive and private customer records from Internet service providers, banks, and credit companies, without any suspicion or prior judicial approval. To make matters even worse, the statute allows the FBI to put gag orders on NSL recipients, prohibiting them from discussing the record demand. The ACLU have filed three lawsuits on behalf of NSL recipients, and most recently, a federal appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that the NSL statute's gag provisions violated the First Amendment.
The Justice Act would also fix the worst parts of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). You remember the FAA, right? That was the law Congress passed last year that immunized telecoms from lawsuits for wiretapping innocent Americans, in collusion with the National Security Agency. In passing the FAA, Congress — with the help of then-Sen. Obama — basically signed away our Fourth Amendment rights by allowing the government to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans' international communications.
We hope Congress and the president will take this opportunity to not only right that wrong, but also fix the overbroad sections of the Patriot Act by passing the Justice Act and signing it into law, restoring Americans' privacy rights.
From toxic waste to toxic assets, the same people always get dumped on
Trafigura is just another case of global fly-tipping. It's all too easy for firms to protect profit and pass risk to the poor world
It was revolting, monstrous, inhumane – and scarcely different from what happens in Africa almost every day. The oil trading company Trafigura has just agreed to pay compensation to 31,000 people in Ivory Coast, after the Guardian and the BBC's Newsnight obtained emails sent by its traders. They reveal that Trafigura knew that the oil slops it sent there in 2006 were contaminated with toxic waste. But the Ivorian contractor it employed to pump out the hold of its tanker dumped them around inhabited areas in the capital city and the countryside. Tens of thousands of people fell ill and 15 died. While the settlement says that the slops could at worst have caused a range of short-term low-level flu-like symptoms, and anxiety, it is one of the world's worst cases of chemical exposure since the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. But in all other respects the Trafigura case is unremarkable. It's just another instance of the rich world's global fly-tipping.
On the day that the Guardian published the company's emails, it also carried a story about a shipwreck discovered in 480 metres of water off the Italian coast. Detectives found the ship after a tip-off from a mafioso. It appears to have been carrying drums of nuclear waste when the mafia used explosives to scuttle it. The informant, Francesco Fonti, said his clan had been paid £100,000 to get rid of it. What makes this story interesting is that the waste appears to be Norwegian. Norway is famous for its tough environmental laws, but a shipload of nuclear waste doesn't go missing without someone high-up looking the other way.
Italian prosecutors are investigating the scuttling of a further 41 ships.
But most of them weren't sunk, like Fonti's vessel, off the coast of Italy; they were lost off the coast of Somalia. When the great tsunami of 2004 struck the Somali coast, it dumped and smashed open thousands of barrels on the beaches and in villages up to 10km inland. According to the United Nations, they contained clinical waste from western hospitals, heavy metals, other chemical junk and nuclear waste. People started suffering from unusual skin infections, bleeding at the mouth, acute respiratory infections and abdominal haemorrhages. The barrels had been dumped in the sea, a UN spokesman said, for one obvious reason: it cost European companies around $2.50 a tonne to dispose of the waste this way, while dealing with them properly would have cost "something like $1,000 a tonne." On the seabed off Somalia lies Europe's picture of Dorian Gray: the skeleton in the closet of the languid new world we have made.
The only people who have sought physically to stop this dumping are Somali pirates.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/sep/21/global-fly-tipping-toxic-waste
Micropayments for news: The holy grail or just a dangerous delusion?
No matter how many times people like Clay Shirky or Mike Masnick try to pop the bubble of faith around micropayments as a cure for what ails the newspaper industry (or even the media industry as a whole), another believer emerges to argue that a secure and extensible micropayment system is a big part of the answer. The latest to make an impassioned plea is Jeff Reifman, the co-founder of NewsCloud, a "community-driven news aggregator" funded by the Knight Foundation.
In a recent blog post, Reifman outlines why he believes that micropayments can solve the newspaper industry's problems. His post is a response to one by Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher, which carried the somewhat argumentative title "Your News Content Is Worth Zero To Digital Consumers," and argued that charging people for news isn't going to work unless that news is highly targeted to a specific niche. (Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a similar point recently about why The Wall Street Journal has been able to charge, and Paul Graham echoes that point as well.)
If you want to go back through some of the reams of text that have been written about micropayments for news, Clay's essay from 2003 is a good place to start — especially since it lists the half-dozen or so attempts to create such a system that failed miserably. (Are you listening, Steve Brill?) There's also a good roundup at the Freakonomics blog from awhile back that is well worth reading.
Reifman defends his approach by pointing to several successful models of payment for services, including iTunes, text messaging, TiVo, and broadband Internet. The first thing that leaped out at me is that three of those four things — iTunes, text messaging and broadband Internet — are a result of something approaching a monopoly (or an oligopoly or cartel, in the case of text messaging and broadband Internet). Apple can charge for music because it controls access to the songs from all the major record labels. Phone companies and cable companies can charge usurious rates for text messaging and Internet because they have little or no real competition. How does any of that apply to newspapers?
In his comments at the Freakonomics blog, Clay Shirky says the "fantasy that small payments will save publishers…is really a fantasy that monopoly pricing power can be re-established over users." I think there's a lot of truth to that. Newspapers have spent the past 100 years or so with a stranglehold on both the tools of mass publishing and the means of distribution, and much of what has happened to them over the past decade is a result of them losing both of those things. The unfortunate reality is that even the best micropayment system is not going to recreate that system of artificial scarcity and control — and some have argued that micropayments could even be bad for journalism as a whole, putting pressure on individual stories to be revenue generators.
Does that mean newspapers can't make any money? Not at all. I think Mike Masnick has done a great job of pointing out how a media business can make money even if it gives content away for free — his company Techdirt does it, plenty of musicians and artists do it. And they do it by using the free content to promote the aspects of their business that have *real* scarcity rather than artificial scarcity.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/micropayments-for-news-the-holy-grail-or-just-a-dangerous-delusion/
UK Anti-Piracy Plans Cost More Than Music Industry ‘Losses’
by enigmax
As the UK file-sharing debate reaches fever pitch, with opinionated artists being shipped in by the bus load to condemn it, inevitably attention is turning to the costs associated with trying to end it. According to a boss at ISP BT, not only are the government's plans doomed to fail, but could end up costing ISPs a staggering £1m a day.
As Lily Allen leads a procession of artists showing a united front against online music piracy and calls ever louder for the government to do something about it, the cold light of day has kicked in. Just how much is the hoped-for crackdown on illicit file-sharers going to cost?
Yesterday, speaking with the UK's The Mirror, John Petter, boss of ISP BT's consumer division, said that measures to tackle Internet piracy will be costly.
Noting that ISP profit margins are already small, Petter said he fears that the process could cost ISPs a staggering £365m a year.
However, according to Jupiter Reseach, whose figures the BPI uses when trying to convince others how much money they lose, the British music industry will lose £200m worth of business to online piracy in 2009.
If the BPI's 'losses' figures are to be believed (and we have to go along with the ridiculous premise of 1 download = 1 lost sale in order to do so), saving £200m worth of business will end up costing ISPs almost double that amount.
"Their [music industry] claims are melodramatic and assume people would buy all the music that is illegally downloaded, which is nonsense," said Petter, adding that laws are already in place to deal with illicit file-sharing, but the industry doesn't want to use those particular ones because it would hurt their public image.
Petter's final point is possibly the most important one. He believes that the war against file-sharing will lead to a technological arms race as Internet users find new ways to hide their activities.
Indeed, by spending a measly £3.00 per month on a cheapo VPN service from the likes of SwissVPN, it's possible for any user to tunnel right out of the UK and no-one in the country will have a clue what they are doing on their connection. Not the BPI, not ISPs, not the government.
That's around 10p per day to defeat a £1m a day system that isn't even in place yet. Something doesn't add up.
http://torrentfreak.com/uk-anti-piracy-plans-cost-more-than-music-industry-losses-090922/
ACORN: The Most Cost-Effective Investment the Government (and Foundations) Have Ever Made
The real purpose of the right's attacks on ACORN is to destroy a remarkably successful 50-year-old grassroots model for defending the poor and workers.
By David Morris
To understand the current attacks on ACORN, and the organization itself, we need to go back more than 60 years, to the 1930s and the New Deal, when for the first time, the federal government accepted responsibility for directly helping the non-working poor.
These programs were expanded in the 1940s, but in the 1950s, a backlash erupted against the poor, driven by several factors.
The postwar prosperity dramatically reduced the number of poor families, and an increasing number of black women were added to the welfare rolls, injecting race into the debate.
Meanwhile, a Republican White House mostly left welfare matters to the states.
The myth of welfare recipients as lazy, immoral chiselers began to circulate. States adopted punitive laws to reduce welfare rolls. Special units of welfare departments conducted "midnight raids" to see if the recipients were involved in a relationship with a man, something that would result in a cut-off of benefits. The average grant declined.
In desperation, low-income mothers in dozens of big cities organized for survival. They came together to collectively negotiate not only with welfare offices for benefits, but with utilities to eliminate deposits required from low-income households and with the post office to install locks on mailboxes in apartment houses to prevent the theft of welfare checks.
Several veterans of the civil rights movement worked to bring local welfare-rights organizations together into a national organization.
In June 1966, a coordinated national day of action brought tens of thousands of people into the streets in 16 major cities. Two months later, representatives of 75 local welfare-rights organizations convened in Chicago to create the National Welfare Rights Organization.
Led by George Wiley, a Ph.D. chemist and leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, NWRO was an unusual organization. It was a federation of local groups that coordinated local and national actions. Black women comprised a majority of its leadership.
NWRO's successes led to rapid growth. By 1969, it boasted over 500 chapters with 22,500 dues-paying families.
In the late 1960s, a growing number of people looked to create a broad-based anti-poverty movement, an idea embraced by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Poor People's Campaign, in which NWRO played an important role.
In 1972, when Wiley left NWRO, he told the New York Times, "The welfare-rights movement created a political and economic crisis around the issue of welfare which could have led to reform or repression. What we are witnessing is repression, and we need a broad, organized movement to counter it."
Wiley wanted to use the NWRO model to build a coalition of the working poor, unemployed, seniors and the lower middle class around issues such as national health insurance, consumer rights, housing and tax reform.
After a tragic accident took Wiley's life in 1973, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, created by two former NWRO organizers Wiley had sent to Little Rock, Ark., in 1970, became the primary vehicle for implementing his vision.
Led by Wade Rathke, ACORN had affiliates in 20 cities by 1980. Today, it has about 400,000 low- and moderate-income members in more than 100 cities in 40 states.
ACORN is one of the few grassroots neighborhood organizations capable of wielding power on a national scale.
It is unique in the combination of strategies it uses: organizing, direct action, lawsuits, lobbying and the provision of direct services.
That ACORN is a federation of self-governing locals with a national board comprised largely of poor people seems to both amaze and gall the right.
Drunk, near-naked Yeltsin found hunting pizza near White House
Boris Yeltsin's drinking 'almost created an international incident', according to Bill Clinton.
Russian leader Boris Yeltsin was once found near the White House late at night dressed in his underwear, seemingly drunk and looking for pizza, according to a new book detailing Bill Clinton's presidency.
The claim comes in a 700-page expose, parsed from hours of secret recordings made by the former US president and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Taylor Branch, excerpts of which were published in USA Today.
Clinton "relayed how Boris Yeltsin's late-night drinking during a visit to Washington in 1995 nearly created an international incident" Taylor told the paper.
Yeltsin had been staying at Blair House, metres from the White House, when he was discovered roaming by secret service agents. When confronted trying to hail a taxi, the former president slurred that he was looking for pizza.
Yeltsin, who died in 2007, is remembered for embarrassing drunken incidents, once seizing the baton from a bandmaster in Germany to conduct and playing the spoons on the president of Kyrgyzstan's bald head.
The book, by a long-time Clinton friend, also details the then president's views of candidates vying to succeed him. In Clinton's view George W Bush "was unqualified to be president ... but he had shrewd campaign instincts".
John McCain, who would eventually lose to Bush and again to Barack Obama in 2008, "might make a good president, but he had no idea how to run."
The book, released next week, is based on 79 taped interviews, which where kept largely secret from Clinton's staff, despite being conducted in the Treaty Room and other locations around the White House.
The tapes were apparently hidden in Clinton's sock drawer.
