Today is a kind of watershed moment when the Internets respond to attempts to censor shit by banging down the back door, but a load of ‘Net peoples have chosen instead to go black.

Daily Kos  has an action line to protest the twin online-control orbs SOPA ‘Stop Online Piracy Act,’ (US House) and PIPA ‘Protect Intellectual Property Act” (US Senate), which reportedly are designed to shut down access to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods, but like a lot of other surveillance-state-of-affairs, there’s more than just bullshit flying.
Copyright law can be a step away from censorship: “Like many other tech companies, we believe that there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking U.S. companies to censor the Internet,” a Google spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday.

And today (Wednesday) Google has a black band over its name on its search site, and Wikipedia leads to a Gothic-looking spot which proclaims “Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge,” in protest of the upcoming Congressional bills.
Along with Wiki, Reddit and Boing Boing, among others were also going black for awhile to protest.
Even HuffPost had a huge, black box at the top of his home page (where a photo/headline usually appears) early Wednesday, and supplies a factoid page here.

All authority hates freedom — one wonders how the popular uprisings in the Middle East, even the Occupy movement here in the US would fare under these laws, and how would freedom really be effected because as it is now, the real freedom is in the ability to get the truth out there.
Even in the most totalitarian regimes on earth, a little iPhone camera can change the outlook of the whole, entire world — in a real sense, currently there can’t be a total news black out and we need to keep it that way.

An understanding via the LA Times:

Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, said the bills set “a horrendous precedent globally” and that much of the content users put online — such as open publishing, crowd-sourced information gathering or comments sections — could all become “incredibly dangerous” if the bills passed.
“We would end up in a situation where we’re trying to do needlepoint with harpoons,” he said.
“You can’t target only pirated information, content or media without getting tons of collateral damage that removes entirely legal content.”
As a screenwriter, East Hollywood resident Steven Darancette, 40, uses Wikipedia often for background information. But he isn’t too concerned about the website going dark Wednesday, saying he supports the protest.
“If I need to get research, I’ll just Google,” he said.
“There are also these things called books.”

The way-big problem, though, is once that door is opened, then locked back again by SOPA/PIPA there’s no going back, the freedom of pure communication will be lost in an Orwellian influenced society, and that ain’t good at all.

I have given my whole life to newspapers.
I am convinced that they have abandoned their functions, and in an abject and ignominious manner, in the present war.
Nine-tenths of them, and even more than nine-tenths, print the official blather without any attempt to scrutinize it… It is a disgraceful spectacle, but I do not believe that anything can be done about it.
Roosevelt has taken the press into camp as certainly has he has taken the Supreme Court.
It has ceased altogether to be independent and has become docilely official.
– H.L. Mencken, June 10, 1944

Shift a few items around, and Mr. Mencken could be writing about the nowadays — the above quote comes from a diary entry.

Journalism as practiced today sucks through a small straw, and one wonders at the astonishment faced by Mencken if he was around right now, marveling at how even-more shitty the rank-and-file news business has become in just the last decade.

A decade of terror-induced hysteria.

(Illustration found here).

The so-called mainstream media — dubbed MSM, a set of letters which in its appearance intuits a sexual preference — has degraded itself into nothing more than a stenographer, printing lies and misinformation as if were plain truth.
One huge example: The 2008 Pulitzer Prize went to the New York Times for its story on those nit-twit military ‘advisors’ on MSM TV in 2003 waxing wonderful on the invasion of Iraq, who were, in fact, in the pocket of the Pentagon — delivering to a naive (and hysterical) US public George Jr.’s line on the whole Iraqi bullshit.
Great story, deserving of a Pulitzer, but who knows of it?
I’ve a good friend who follows the news real close, but he’s never heard of the NYT article — and he’s not The Lone Ranger, a vast-majority of US peoples have never heard of it either.
My friend’s problem?
He doesn’t go online.

In my humble opinion, the Internet keeps the MSM from becoming a government mouthpiece.
And now that might be a problem.
Via antiwar.com and blogger Crystal L. Cox:

A federal judge in Oregon has ruled that a Montana woman sued for defamation was not a journalist when she posted online that an Oregon lawyer acted criminally during a bankruptcy case, a decision with implications for bloggers around the country.
…
U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez found last week that as a blogger, Cox was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news outlets.
Although media experts said Wednesday that the ruling would have little effect on the definition of journalism, it casts a shadow on those who work in nontraditional media since it highlights the lack of case law that could protect them and the fact that current state shield laws for journalists are not covering recent developments in online media.
…
Hernandez said Cox was not a journalist because she offered no professional qualifications as a journalist or legitimate news outlet.
She had no journalism education, credentials or affiliation with a recognized news outlet, proof of adhering to journalistic standards such as editing or checking her facts, evidence she produced an independent product or evidence she ever tried to get both sides of the story.
Cox said she considered herself a journalist, producing more than 400 blogs over the past five years, with a proprietary technique to get her postings on the top of search engines where they get the most notice.
“What could be more mainstream than the Internet and the top of the search engine?” she said.
…
Ellyn Angelotti, who teaches about digital trends and social media at The Poynter Institute, said the ruling was significant because so little case law has built up on online media.
But she believed it would have little impact on bloggers in general until the U.S. Supreme Court takes up a case, or more federal courts rule.
Kyu Ho Youm, a First Amendment expert and journalism professor at the University of Oregon, called the judge’s strict definition of a journalist “outdated” since so-called citizen journalists currently outnumber traditional journalists.
“When we talk about the shield law, we should pay more attention to the function people are doing than whether people are connected to traditional and established news media,” he said.

Yes, indeed.

And the time is approaching, case in point: The Protect IP Act, and its sister, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would allow the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders focused on shutting down websites accused of copyright infringement, and in the process, will limit free speech and innovation.
Both of these pending laws will change the outlook of the Net — both of which are called “Intolerable Acts” by Slate in a post yesterday:

SOPA would go even further, creating a system of private regulation to shut down websites that are accused of not doing enough to prevent infringement.
Keep in mind that these shutdowns would happen before a site owner could defend himself in court—SOPA could punish sites without even establishing whether they are guilty of the charges brought against them.
…
Rather than blocking online copyright infringement, legislation like SOPA and Protect IP would instigate a data obfuscation arms race, making legitimate law enforcement efforts all the more difficult.
If the United States decides that copyright infringement must be stopped at any cost, the required censorship regime will depend on ever more invasive practices, such as monitoring users’ personal Web traffic.
This counterproductive cat-and-mouse game of censorship and circumvention would drive savvy scofflaws to darknets while increasing surveillance of less technically proficient Internet users.

The Net could go a bit darker.

And a sense of why was captured last Sept. 11 by Spencer Ackerman at Wired:

Ten years ago today, 2,996 people were murdered, unleashing a pair of destructive, mutually reinforcing trends.
To prove their relevance, terrorists keep trying to attack the United States at home.
And the media and politicians react to it with hysteria, running in fear of getting blamed for a successful attack and perpetuating the gigantic, expensive, counterproductive National Security State.
As awful as the snuffing of so many souls on 9/11 was, the second trend has often proved more dangerous than the first.

I-Journalism might become ‘more dangerous‘ in the near future, and in its fashion, the MSM will end up the new porn.

“Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.
Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.
The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further.
With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.”
– George Orwell, 1984 (quote found here)

(Illustration found here).

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke Monday during a panel discussion at London’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism — he was announcing another WikiLeaks dump, this time the files concern private surveillance companies who have worked with various world governments to track whoever via monitoring software integrated into electronic devices.

“Who here has a BlackBerry?
Who here uses Gmail?
Well you are all screwed!” Assange exclaimed.
“The reality is intelligence contractors are selling right to countries around the world mass surveillance systems for all of those products.”

Meanwhile, just yesterday, Sen. Al Franken demanded an explanation on how the so-called ‘Carrier IQ,’ installed all new Android smartphones, really works — this hidden software  is supposedly meant to help mobile carriers monitor and diagnose problems with their devices, but in reality may transmit personal information.
In a letter to Carrier IQ President and CEO Larry Lenhart, Franken wanted more information on the capabilities of the device.
Via Raw Story:

“I am very concerned by recent reports that your company’s software—pre-installed on smartphones used by millions of Americans—is logging and may be transmitting extraordinarily sensitive information from consumers’ phones…
“I understand the need to provide usage and diagnostic information to carriers,” he continued.
“I also understand that carriers can modify Carrier IQ’s software.
But it appears that Carrier IQ’s software captures a broad swath of extremely sensitive information from users that would appear to have nothing to do with diagnostics—including who they are calling, the contents of the texts they are receiving, the contents of their searches, and the websites they visit.”
“These actions may violate federal privacy laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” Franken warned.
“This is potentially a very serious matter.”

Serious indeed.
Franken was responding to a claim from Trevor Eckhart, a 25-year-old electronics expert, that the Carrier IQ operation can be used in nefarious ways.
On Eckhart’s blog he explains how this works, and despite a lot of geek shit (non-sensible to me), he concludes:

The fact that it’s embedded into the shipped device raises very serious security and privacy concerns.
…
The CIQ application is embedded so deeply in the device that it can’t be fully removed without rebuilding the phone from source code.
This is only possible for a user with advanced skills and a FULLY unlocked device.
…
If a bad actor discovered a vulnerability or used malware, he could potentially exploit that opportunity to become a “CIQ operator,” leaving many users helpless against the extensive collection and misuse of their own information and no way to stop it.
With so much moving code across the operating system, I would say the chances of malware looking here isn’t that far-fetched.

Of course, Carrier IQ got pissed at Eckhart, fired off a cease-and-desist letter and demanded he issue an apology for calling its software a”rootkit,” but back-tracked when Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved.
The EFF is an US-based non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization.
From CNET News:

Just days later, Carrier IQ did an about face after the Electronic Frontier Foundation responded to its cease-and-desist letter, saying that Eckhart’s comments and research are protected under the Copyright Act’s fair use provision.
“Our action was misguided and we are deeply sorry for any concern or trouble that our letter may have caused Mr. Eckhart,” the company said in response to the EFF’s letter.
“We sincerely appreciate and respect EFF’s work on his behalf, and share their commitment to protecting free speech in a rapidly changing technological world.”

In dumping the surveillance logs, termed “The Spy Files,” WikiLeaks on its Web site explains:

International surveillance companies are based in the more technologically sophisticated countries, and they sell their technology on to every country of the world.
This industry is, in practice, unregulated.
Intelligence agencies, military forces and police authorities are able to silently, and on mass, and secretly intercept calls and take over computers without the help or knowledge of the telecommunication providers.
Users’ physical location can be tracked if they are carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on stand by.
…
When citizens overthrew the dictatorships in Egypt and Libya this year, they uncovered listening rooms where devices from Gamma corporation of the UK, Amesys of France, VASTech of South Africa and ZTE Corp of China monitored their every move online and on the phone.
…
The CIA officials have bought software that allows them to match phone signals and voice prints instantly and pinpoint the specific identity and location of individuals.
Intelligence Integration Systems, Inc., based in Massachusetts — sells a “location-based analytics” software called Geospatial Toolkit for this purpose.
Another Massachusetts company named Netezza, which bought a copy of the software, allegedly reverse engineered the code and sold a hacked version to the Central Intelligence Agency for use in remotely piloted drone aircraft.

And this is beyond just the old ‘looking over you shoulder‘ routine — be aware and be watchful, they are.

Emma Sullivan, 18, was hauled into her principal’s office and ordered to write letters of apology after one of Governor Sam Brownback’s office contacted the tour organizer to complain about the offending note on the social networking site Twitter.

Ms Sullivan, however, will not backtrack, saying she isn’t sorry and doesn’t think such a letter would be sincere.
And her mother agrees: I raised my kids to be independent, to be strong, to be free thinkers. If she wants to tweet her opinion about Gov. Brownback, I say for her to go for it and I stand totally behind her.”

(Illustration found here).

Reportedly, young Emma had disagreed with Brownback’s veto of the Kansas Arts Commission’s entire budget, making it the only state in the nation to eliminate arts funding — join the crowd, Emma.

“I think it would be interesting to have a dialogue with him,” she said.
“I don’t know if he would do it or not though.
And I don’t know that he would listen to what I have to say.”

And Emma is most-perceptive about the two-faced GOP — Think Progress reports Brownback’s baby-like over-reaction caused Emma’s high school to violate her First Amendment rights: Moreover, because the school district violated Sullivan’s clearly established federal constitutional rights, she is likely entitled to have the district or the principal pay her attorney’s fees if she decides to bring a lawsuit challenging this unconstitutional disciplinary action. In other words, the district could be wise to settle this case immediately if Sullivan decides to bring them to court.
Republicans don’t seem to care about the US Constitution, the rule of law or even for the general welfare of US peoples — the GOP is most-likely the most anti-American group in existence today.

And maybe, too, anti-life-as-we-know-it.
The biggest catch for action on climate change comes from the right-sided GOP, even as COP17 starts today in South Africa.
From Agence France-Presse via Raw Story:

When lawmakers cannot agree that climate change is a problem for which solutions must be sought, gridlock ensues, according to Democratic lawmaker Henry Waxman.
“During this Congress, the Republican-controlled House has voted 21 times to block actions to address climate change,” he said at a hearing this month.
“History will look back on this science denial with profound regret.”

Henry, it’s a profound regret right this freakin’ now.
And even right-wingers know it — Norm Ornstein, a congressional scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, says the GOP needs to get a good beating: “The best way to reach a deal for Obama is to pull out the partisan cudgel and slam them between the eyes repeatedly,” says Ornstein. “They’ll only come to the table if their political brand is damaged. They’re not coming for the good of the country.”
The dollar, they’re coming for the dollar.

One must also keep in mind the kind of country the US is today, thanks to Republicans with aid from spineless, chickenshit Democrats.
From Peter Van Buren at Tomdispatch yesterday:

As the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, like those pepper-sprayed at UC Davis or the Marine veteran shot in Oakland, recently found out, the government’s ability to limit free speech, to stopper the First Amendment, to undercut the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, is perhaps the most critical issue our republic can face.
If you were to write the history of the last decade in Washington, it might well be a story of how, issue by issue, the government freed itself from legal and constitutional bounds when it came to torture, the assassination of U.S. citizens, the holding of prisoners without trial or access to a court of law, the illegal surveillance of American citizens, and so on.
In the process, it has entrenched itself in a comfortable shadowland of ever more impenetrable secrecy, while going after any whistleblower who might shine a light in.

Read the whole post, it gets even more shitty.
Anything the GOP does should be scorned and pushed way-aside, or else the mourning will be in earnest.

The case against that guy arrested in New York City yesterday and charged with plotting to blow up U.S. targets, including American soldiers returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of preparing to launch a one-man holy war in New York City — 27-year-old unemployed ‘lone wolf‘ Jose Pimentel — was apparently considered way-too dicey and not serious-enough for the FBI.
Hence, Pimentel was arraigned on state, not federal charges.

From TPM this afternoon:

The 27-year-old accused of plotting to attack New York with pipe bombs was operating a website that espoused his beliefs in committing terror against the U.S. and was relatively well known in law enforcement circles.
Federal authorities passed on the case — with one source telling TPM on Sunday night that the FBI passed several times, and an official telling the Associated Press on Monday that Pimentel “didn’t have the predisposition or the ability to do anything on his own.”
That’s leaving observers wondering what exactly the feds didn’t like about the case and setting up another squabble in the long-running turf war between the New York Police Department and the FBI.

In the scope of modern life, hard to imagine anything more dangerously dumb.
And incompetently useless.

The tale sounds like the bullshit in September when Mansour Arbabsiar, a naturalized US citizen with an Iranian passport from Corpus Christi, Texas, a failed used-car salesman, “sort of a hustler,” though, “no mastermind,” and “was likable, albeit a bit lazy,” was charged this time by the FBI with plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a Washington DC restaurant.
And Mr. Arbabsiar was supposed to do this via a complicated plot involving murderous Mexican drug lords and Iran.

On more occasions nowadays, reality seems to have taken a holiday.

Last night, a new ‘lone wolf’ terrorist, Jose Pimentel, was arraigned in a New York court on charges of targeting U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan servicemen, and also intended to strike U.S. postal facilities and police in New York and Bayonne, New Jersey.
Pimentel’s attorney, Joseph Zablock, begs to differ:

“As they admit, he has a very public online profile, and that flies in the face of everything that they’ve said,” Zablocki said at the hearing.
“This is not the way you go about committing terrorist attacks.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “There is no evidence he worked with anyone else…He appears to be … a lone wolf.”

(Illustration found here).

Since Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists are hiding under just about every rock in the US and all around the world.
And a lot of these so-called ‘lone wolf’ terrorists have been goaded on by the very peoples who are supposed to be watching out for such things — a situation similar to leaving keys in the car, hoping an attempt would be made to steal it, then jump the perpetrator.
Glenn Greenwald has a most-excellent overview of these FBI-inspired terror operations here.

Even the ‘lone wolf’ category was added to the infamous Patriot Act in 2004.
So scared shitless, the FBI creates terror where once there was just poverty, much injustice and unemployment — job security at its zenith.

Mother Jones magazine conducted an investigation last August on all these supposedly ‘lone wolf’ incidents and found that 10 percent of all these cases were led by an “agent provocateur,” and exposed several as weak examples of terrorism “instigated” by the FBI.
Furthermore, from The Investigative Project on Terrorism:

The FBI has nearly tripled its use of informants since 9/11, the report says.
That surge in the number of FBI informants, according to Mother Jones’ Trevor Aaronson, is worrisome.
“The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack,” a teaser atop Aaronson’s article “Informants,” which includes those statistics, reads.
“But are they busting terrorist plots-or leading them?”
…
“I think in many of these cases nothing would have happened were it not for the FBI going in and making a plot possible,” Aaronson told NPR.
But in a post 9/11 world, informants must be sent in before a plot is in the works with real bad guys.
Former FBI counter terrorism official Arthur Cummings told Aaronson why.
“We’re looking for the sympathizer who wants to become an operator, and we want to catch them when they step over that line to operator.”

Despite all this, the FBI and other agencies failed to do anything in October when a ‘lone wolf’ terrorist  threw a bottle containing volatile liquids into a crowd at an OWS gathering in Maine.
From emptywheel:

In other words, the attack in ME — even if it was as pathetic as Mohamud’s alleged attack or that of any number of aspirational Muslim terrorists — was an attempt to use a WMD, since explosives qualify as a WMD.
And even more than Mohamud’s alleged attack, this was an attempt to achieve political ends through violence.
Terrorism.
…
And yet, somehow, in the absence of a young Muslim man goaded on and provided explosives by the FBI itself, the FBI doesn’t see it as terrorism.

A point of selective action, I guess.

This over-reaching by US authorities might have a day in court.
In 2010, four poor guys from a US horror hole, Newburgh, NY, about 60 miles north of New York City — a place of drugs and crime — were arrested on charges of terrorism, and eventually three were sentenced to 25 years in prison.
According to firedoglake: US District Judge Colleen McMahon understood the men were only in her court for sentencing because the FBI “created an act of terrorism.” She understood the FBI scripted the plot from “start to finish.” But, afraid to upset superiors or government officials, she condemned the defendants’ anti-Semitism and their willingness to “kill, maim and destroy for money.”
Those guys were used as ‘counterterror lab rats.’
And these guys were apparently easy pickings by the FBI.

From UK’s The Guardian last week:

Lawyers for the so-called Newburgh Four have now launched an appeal that will be held early next year. Advocates hope the case offers the best chance of exposing the issue of FBI “entrapment” in terror cases. “We have as close to a legal entrapment case as I have ever seen,” said Susanne Brody, who represents another Newburgh defendant, Onta Williams.
Some experts agree.
“The target, the motive, the ideology and the plot were all led by the FBI,” said Karen Greenberg, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, who specialises in studying the new FBI tactics.
…
Even more shocking was that the organisation, money, weapons and motivation for this plot did not come from real Islamic terrorists.
It came from the FBI, and an informant paid to pose as a terrorist mastermind paying big bucks for help in carrying out an attack.
For McWilliams, her own government had actually cajoled and paid her beloved nephew into being a terrorist, created a fake plot and then jailed him for it.
“I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone,” she told the Guardian.
…
This year the jailed Liberty City men launched an appeal and last week judgment was handed down. They lost, and officially remain Islamic terrorists hell-bent on destroying America. Not that their supporters see it that way.
“Our country is no safer as a result of the prosecution of these seven impoverished young men from Liberty City,” said Batiste’s lawyer, Ana Jhones.
“This prosecution came at great financial cost to our government, and at a terrible emotional cost to these defendants and their families. It is my sincere belief that our country is less safe as a result of the government’s actions in this case.”

Wonder what J. Edgar would have thought — he’d most-likely be overjoyed.

Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line.
That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September.
All told, that places 100 million people — one in three Americans — either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.

(Illustration of Picasso’s “Poverty” found here).

Online NYT head: “Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘Near Poor’ Startle the Census” — as in to alarm, frighten, or surprise suddenly, the Census Bureau.
In the lives of most-ordinary, walking-around US peoples, that fact most-likely doesn’t ‘startle‘ at all.
And the NYT story also comes up with another ‘startling‘ factoid, though, already well-understood by a way-big chunk of Americans: Perhaps the most surprising finding is that 28 percent work full-time, year round. “These estimates defy the stereotypes of low-income families,” Ms. Renwick (Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau’s chief poverty statistician) said.
And sometimes, startlingly so, a chunk of that chunk works two jobs.
The feeling evoked by one lady interviewed by the Times: “I try to work as many hours as I can, but my salary, it’s not enough for everything,” she said. “I pay my bills with very small wiggle room. Or none.”
A good overview/recap of children involved with US poverty can be found at Daily Kos — The poverty rate for children under 18 increased from 20 percent in 2009 to 21.6 percent in 2010. That translates to 1.1 million more children living in poverty.

Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported in an economic survey, that US peoples’ incomes have dropped in the past decade, and is continuing to descend, and won’t get back up for another decade, if then.

From 2000 to 2010, median income in the U.S. declined 7 percent after adjusting for inflation, according to Census data.
That marks the worst 10-year performance in records going back to 1967.
On average, the economists expect inflation-adjusted incomes to rise over the next decade, but the 5 percent projected gain isn’t enough to reach prerecession levels.
“Standards of living in the U.S. will continue to decline as we deleverage and emerging markets take over as the growth engine of the global economy,” says Julia Coronado of BNP Paribas.

And these stagnant wages don’t help any kind of economic growth, though, it does keep the decent slow, and not-so-easy — the only real, true way to achieve and keep growth is by increased wages for working peoples.
In fact, this US wage/income downer has spread — from the UK’s The Guardian on Saturday:

The British middle class is in danger of suffering prolonged American-style wage stagnation as a result of widening income inequality and a weak jobs market for skilled employment, a top US economist says.
…
The summit will highlight how the incomes of middle-class, working-age households in the US fell marginally from $56,000 a year in 1989 to $55,200 in 2010.
Over the same period, the US economy grew by 60 percent.
For men in full-time employment the median earnings level was about $49,000 in 1973 and $48,000 in 2010.
While the trend in the US has been established for far longer, economists say a similar pattern has begun to emerge in the UK, where median wages flatlined between 2002 and 2008 – despite it being a period of 16 percent economic growth.

Those ‘near poor’ people just might be the new middle class.

Meanwhile, the US Congress is getting fatter, still, with nearly half the bunch being millionaires — The estimated median net worth of a current U.S. senator in 2010 stood at an average of $2.56 million.
From ABC News and a report from the The Center for Responsive Politics: “Despite the global economic meltdown in 2008 and the sluggish recovery that followed, that’s up about 7.6 percent from an estimated median net worth of $2.38 million in 2009 … and up 13 percent from a median net worth of $2.27 million in 2008. …
And the shitheads are immune from financial crime — trading stock on insider information would require jail time for anybody else.

The problem brings us around to OWS, again — the 1 percent is striking back at the 99 percent.
And the horror-hypocrisy on the right stymies everything.
Witness near-bonkers Rick Santorum (via Think Progress): If “you’re lower income, you can qualify for Medicaid, you can qualify for food stamps, you can qualify for housing assistance,” Santorum complained, before adding, “suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.”
What an asshole.

Or Newt Gingrich, blubbering nonsense  against hecklers: “Hold on,” Gingrich told the crowd. “I want to answer you very directly. There is no such thing in America as 99 percent! We are 100 percent Americans! We are all part of America!”
Gingrich has some harassment problems, too — the media is after him on his Freddie Mac bullshit.
And last week, of course, the police-state images of police breaking-up OWS sites around the country — Berkeley to Denver to New York — with a visual vengeance not often seen in the good-old US of A.
A good post on a nasty, one-sided confrontation at UC Davis is found at The Dish.
And glimpse a near-perfect photo of the reality of the moment at Digby’s — maybe OWS has had a much-bigger impact.
However, the near-normal response of the police/military is over-reaction, they’ll do it just about every time.
Timing is near-about everything, and the nationwide crackdown on OWS occurred as if set by schedule, and for the most part, it was, though, few officials will discuss these ‘conference calls‘ at depth — yet.
And in a similar vein, a Washington lobbying firm has proposed a kind of Nixon-like ‘dirty tricks” program to undermine OWS and those sympathetic to the movement.
From msnbc’s Up w/ Chris Hayes (h/t Balloon Juice): CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead.

In the midst of a shitload of problems from climate change to the Eurozone is a possible movement/revolution — at least some of the 1 percent are taking it seriously, hopefully putting them in a fretful zone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, America’s greatest philosopher, visited Thoreau in jail.
Emerson asked: “Henry, why are you here?”
Thoreau replied: “Why are you not here?”
– In protest of the Mexican War, 1846

In those crackdowns this week on the OWS, a deep, sinking feeling of nefarious, dark workings:

Questions about the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) potential involvement in the violent crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street protests nationwide continue to grow today, with new reports that not only were they sighted at several of the crackdowns but in one case photographic evidence of DHS forces arresting a photographer at a Portland rally.

Apparently, for the powers that be, OWS got too hot for the kitchen.

(Illustration found here).

In the last few days, the operation of the US government in ‘closing down’ the OWS movement in cities across America would have given George Orwell a ‘I-told-you-so’ belly ache.
Reports indicate the nationwide police actions were coordinated events: And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.
The 1 percent strikes back, huh?

And the pure nasty, mean-spirited approach to clearing New York’s Zuccotti Park makes a situation worse when authority does its so-called duty with glee.
Via Raw Story:

“Everything, everything we had: gone,” said Chris Carter, a New Jersey native and firefighter who has been part of the “Occupy” medical staff since the second day of the protests.
“All the medications we had: Tylenol, cough machine, two AED Defibrillators units, vitamins, an asthma inhaler. Nothing left.”
Carter pointed out that the medical staff lost more than $4,000 of equipment during the raid, raising a level of frustration in his voice where they likely will have to contact hospitals to handle simple tasks.
…
New York University law student Dee Armstrong observed how the sanitation department and police were aggressively dealing with all items, not just sleeping equipment.
“Police were cutting the tents so they couldn’t be re-used,” she said.
“And I kept hearing people say, ‘Give it to the homeless, give it to the homeless.’
Then they would throw them into a pile, and I think you could see on any of the footage that they just throw them into this huge dumpster, with claims that it was going to the storage unit.
But how on Earth are you suppose to find your items?”
She added: “Some people’s backpacks, textbooks, laptops, there was people’s laptops that were just thrown in the sanitation truck where you could see it on the livestream footage.”

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said OWS is welcomed back to the park, but no tents and other type gear.
And what about Bloomberg?
Matt Taibbi covered that already: Well, you know what, Mike Bloomberg? FUCK YOU. People are not protesting for their own entertainment, you asshole. They’re protesting because millions of people were robbed, by your best friends incidentally, and they want their money back. And you’re not everybody’s Dad, so stop acting like you are.
Yeah.

The entire nationwide/worldwide OWS movement is the neatest single event(s) I’ve seen (and felt) in a long, long time — in fact, the protests might be on a level of the Vietnam-era shenanigans 40 years ago.
Indeed, OWS has opened that nasty can of worms of badly-skewered financial dealings and revealed the banks run the country, and the world.
And despite US peoples’ attitudes about OWS has wavered in the last few days — mainly due to outside interests crashing the party — the bottom line is that now everybody knows there’s a humongous divide between the haves and the have-nots, creating a violent undertaste.

And in response to all this ugly shit by DHS and the like, OWS is calling for “mass non-violent direct action” today in cities across the US — in New York, planned events included “shut down Wall Street;” “occupy the subways,” a plan to gather at 16 hubs, and “take the square,” a reference to Foley Square, across from City Hall; in Portland, Oregon, plans include “occupy banks;” in Los Angeles, organizers called for a protest downtown, shutting down an intersection; and events are also planned in Boston, Minneapolis, and other cities.
Go get ‘em!

In capturing this OSW sense, Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture has some passionate words for the state of the US, a passion titillated by anger.
The heated scoop:

In America, we are too busy dropping the kids off at soccer, running around looking for sales and bargains, racing to keep our heads above water.
We seem to forget to get outraged.
Our control over our once Democracy — the one we had a revolution against a monarchy dictating decisions from afar — slips away from us.
Not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a 1000s acts of gradual ceding of power to the new Monarch.
We have given up hard won rights to a coordinated attack from all three branches of government; Our Congress has become the legislative branch of eBay — Congressmen are auctioned off to the highest bidder; they even have a Buy It Now button to get specific legislation passed.
The executive branch has fallen under the sunk cost fallacy, afraid to prosecute banks because we spent so many billions bailing them out.
It turns out that even our once venerable Supreme Court is just as corrupted, with lobbyists partying with Justices and backdooring ethics by hiring their wives.
In short, our new overlords are enormously well funded, well connected, relentless and perhaps most of all, patient.
This new King was not appointed by primogeniture, or even Divine Right, but by acquiring enough profits in the free market that they can buy control over society, even as they thwart that free market ideal for their own ends.
We have become, in short, a Corporate Monarchy.
The right question isn’t why am I angry, sad and outraged.
The proper question is, why aren’t you?

Thoreau would have screamed, “Fuck Yeah!”

Ten years ago today, George Jr. signed into law the infamous USA/Patriot Act, a move which revealed the end game for the great American experiment in democracy — nowadays the US is closer to George Orwell than George Washington.

And although George Jr. originally started it, the supposedly big change-master, President Obama, has signed re-authorization bills three times during his tenure so far, and has continually pushed not for transparency in government (as he campaigned), but if documents requested by the public are exempt from freedom of information laws, federal agencies should be able to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”

(Illustration found here).

Pretty-much everyone knows the Act is shitty (except the government).
In 2007, two parts of the Patriot Act was found to be unconstitutional: Search and intelligence gathering was a bit too much.
From CNN four years ago:

“It is critical that we, as a democratic nation, pay close attention to traditional Fourth Amendment principles,” wrote Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in her 44-page decision.
“The Fourth Amendment has served this nation well for 220 years, through many other perils.”

The case came from a lawsuit filed by Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer thought to be involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombings — wrong!

The federal government later apologized to Mayfield and settled part of Mayfield’s lawsuit for $2 million. But Mayfield was permitted to keep pursuing the portions of his lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Patriot Act.
Mayfield claimed in the suit that his home and law offices were secretly broken into by the FBI, his clients’ files at his office were searched, his business and personal computers were secretly copied, his telephone was wiretapped and his home was bugged.
Mayfield said he was “excited and happy” with the ruling.
“This, to me, is not so much personal,” he said.
“I think it’s just the right thing to do.
It was the right thing to continue to challenge the constitutionality of the Patriot Act.”

And to be even more nasty, Nicholas Merrill, in a piece in the Washington Post yesterday, wrote of the actual, nefarious operation of the Patriot Act, and how if left alone, the US government will greatly f*ck over each and every US person without blinking an all-seeing eye.
Merrill, an owner of a small Internet provider, described the FBI seeking information on one of his clients in 2004, and (this is the big-ludicrous part) he was totally forbidden from telling “any person” the G-men had even contacted him.
Instead, to his credit, Merrill went to the ALCU.
He reflects now:

A decade later, much of the government’s surveillance policy remains shrouded in secrecy, making it impossible for the American public to engage in a meaningful debate on the effectiveness or wisdom of various practices.
The government has used NSLs to collect private information on hundreds of thousands of people.
I am the only person from the telecommunications industry who received one to ever challenge in court the legality of the warrantless NSL searches and the associated gag order and to be subsequently (partially) un-gagged.
…
For years, the government implausibly claimed that if I were able to identify myself as the plaintiff in the case, irreparable damage to national security would result.
But I did not believe then, nor do I believe now, that the FBI’s gag order was motivated by legitimate national security concerns.
It was motivated by a desire to insulate the FBI from public criticism and oversight.

The standard bullshit line — damage to national security.
Hey, kiss the ass of all US peoples.

Then absolutely no one should be surprised at the latest New York Times/CBS News poll: Not only do 89 percent of Americans say they distrust government to do the right thing, but 74 percent say the country is on the wrong track and 84 percent disapprove of Congress — warnings for Democrats and Republicans alike.

Hard to believe, huh?
Nearly 90 percent of US peoples don’t trust Washington, DC — of course, the economy is the front-burner pot on fire, but in the back of everybody’s mind is that even if you’re unemployed and your home is underwater, you  still need to be watched just in case you go crazy and run off to join al-Qaeda.
Crazed all over.

And what did the most-wonderful Patriot Act actually help do?
Nothing less than create a humongous intelligence-gathering apparatus, which turned out to be completely incompetent — a more than $2 trillion waste.
In a Washington Post review of the book, “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,” by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, comes this bottom line view: If a large chunk of the federal government is disappearing down a black hole, that hole leaks. In this, as in many other instances supplied by Priest and Arkin, “one of the greatest secrets of Top Secret America is its disturbing dysfunction.”

In line with all this shit..
Much, much more of this ‘national security’ crap — from allgov.com:

Established by Congress to investigate and expose government waste, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan has decided to not reveal its volumes of materials to the public for another two decades.
After three years of work, the commission officially shut down last week, having concluded that the U.S. misspent between $31 billion and $60 billion in contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But it won’t allow its records to be opened for public review at the National Archives until 2031, because some of the documents contain “sensitive information,” according to one official.
Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told The Wall Street Journal that the 20-year term “seems like a long period of time, particularly for a commission whose whole purpose is to improve accountability and expose waste.”

In the shadow: “Sanity is not statistical.”

Reportedly, about 147 super-connected corporations — out of 43,000 studied in recent research — carry disproportionate power over the global economy.
This from NewScientist on research by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich into transnational corporations — TNCs — that’s good, but disheartening:

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder.
“Our analysis is reality-based.”

Greed always gathers the nefarious.

(illustration found here).

Also from the NewScientist piece on the study’s findings (h/t: War in Context):

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships.
Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20.
What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies — all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity — that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network.
“In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder.
Most were financial institutions.
The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

Why does this shit sound so freakin’ familiar.