Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS - Government's over-reaching surveillance system

When Judges around the country cite the novel, 1984, as legal precedent maybe that's a sign that Big Brother is alive and well and quietly monitoring everything we do.  The issue is the GPS features in cell phones, and the Fourth Ammendment's promise of protection against Government invasion of our privacy.  A recent NY Times article gives a litany of court cases involving GPS devices, GPS features of cell phones, and the repeated invocation of a novel, 1984, as legal precedent.

http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=rss_sho&shofile=10-1473_002.pdf: Judge Diane P. Wood of the federal appeals court in Chicago wrote about GPS-based surveillance saying “make the system that George Orwell depicted in his famous novel, ‘1984,’ seem clumsy.”

http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/08/12/08-30385.pdf: Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the federal appeals court in San Francisco wrote that “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.”

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/08/cellsite.pdf: Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn denied a government request for over 3 months of "location data from cellphone towers" calling it an “Orwellian intrusion” and asking whether the courts must “begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.”

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org: In November the Supreme Court will hear United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259 which will "will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?"

Today we routinely carry devices that track our every move (cell phones, cars, toll collection passes, etc) and those devices give us valuable information we use in our lives.  For example I frequently whip out my iPhone or iPad and use the Map feature to figure out where i am and how to get to a location.  That Map feature determines my location using both GPS circuits and interpolated location information from cellphone towers.

The Supreme Court case is itself an appeal of an earlier decision by a 3 judge Appeals Court panel ruling that the government is seeking too much information.  http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1046181.html

 

Source: Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS

The criminalization of speech since 9/11 and use of the "Material support for terrorism law"

Remember what freedom of speech was like before Sept 11, 2001?  Today it's different, and it's worth pondering the place we've arrived and why.  Today you can be arrested for wearing the wrong T-Shirt to specific events, such as attending a speech by the President while a shirt bearing a statement in support of Islam, or critical of the U.S. Government.  Many such as myself were wary of the patriotism and flag-waving following Sept 11, 2001 because this sort of nationalistic fervor has been behind atrocities committed by other countries in the past.  And the "either you're with us or against us" tone of the Bush Administration may have been useful in corralling support from other governments, but when it was applied to the American People it has turned into a pattern of repressing freedoms of Americans to do things like exercise free speech and other rights that make America what it is.

That's the tone of a Salon.COM article posted yesterday, on Sept 10, 2011 (the eve of 9/11's 10th anniversary), an article that focused on how the Bush and Obama administrations have taken strong measures to criminalize our right to free speech.

Prosecutors, since Sept 11, 2001, have been aggressively using a pre-existing law criminalizing "material support" for designated terrorist groups.  The U.S. State Department is in charge of designating these groups, and it would be a concern worthy perhaps of criminal penalties for significant aid to actual terrorist groups.  There are other examples that could be an example of aggressive government that limits our freedom, but the Salon.COM article (linked below) focuses on a specific example.

What does the material-support law say, exactly?

It gives the government the power to designate non-U.S. groups as foreign terrorist organizations based on very broad criteria. That includes whether the group has used or threatened to use a weapon against personal property; whether the group's activities undermine our national defense, foreign relations or economic interests.

What's worrying however is that "terrorist group" is broadly defined, one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, and so to is "material support" broadly defined.

What is most problematic about the law, though, is "material support" has been interpreted so broadly. It is used regardless of whether the provider has the intent to support terrorism, or whether any specific act of terrorism has taken place or is being planned, and even to include pure speech and advocacy.

The Salon article references the case of Jubair Ahmad who was recently convicted of "material support" for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) because he uploaded a video to YouTube.  The Salon article doesn't go into what kind of group LeT is, nor the type of video, but it does seem the act of uploading a video is very small in terms of "material support".

How and how much has this statute been used in the decade since Sept. 11?

The law is widely used "in suspected terrorism cases" in both federal courts and military commissions.  In the Lashkar-e-Taiba it was used to prosecute what would normally be a First-Amendment-protected-activity (freedom of speech).

Is this a post-9/11 law?

The law existed before Sept 11, 2001.  However it's use and interpreted has changed dramatically since that date.

The Supreme Court held in a 1969 case called Brandenburg v. Ohio that even advocacy of violence can be criminalized only when it is intended to result in imminent criminal conduct and if it is likely to produce imminent criminal conduct.

In other words, before Sept 11, 2001, there was acknowledgement that speech the government disagrees with is itself part of the marketplace of ideas that is protected by the First Amendment.   A common phrase about this goes something like: "I may hate what s/he says, but I will fight for his/her right to say it".  That's one of the core principles of the U.S. but is that what our government is practicing today?

Advocacy and freedom of speech can serve as a safety valve so that people can let of steam before their anger escalates to committing acts of violence.

A Supreme Court case last year held for the first time that the Government can criminalize speech, even speech advocating lawful activity.  The case was Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project (that is, Attorney General Holder).  Its result, stated by Salon.COM, is to thwart the efforts of humanitarian groups to persuade violent organizations in renouncing their violence.

What were the facts of that Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project case?

Human rights groups wanted to assist two groups (Kurdistan Workers' Party in Turkey and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka) by teaching them the ropes of bringing human rights claims to the United Nations.  Their goal was to teach International Law and nonviolence, hoping to promote peace.  The U.S. designated both as terrorist groups.  The Supreme Court declared that promoting peace among terrorist groups violates the material support law.

 

 

 

 

Source: The criminalization of speech since 9/11

The indebted are controlled by debt holders - the Banks are telling the U.S. what to do

Is there a financial collapse of the U.S. and other Western powers underway? I don't know. I do know that collectively the U.S. and other countries have been running up quite a debt. Before someone blames it on Obama, in the U.S. most of the debt came during the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II years. The Bush II years were especially disastrous with running up a debt due to idiotic tax cuts for the rich and wealthy (under the failed Trickle Down Economics theory pushed by Reagan and which Bush I called voodoo economics) alongside running two off-the-books wars simultaneously alongside an unfunded prescription drug program. Obama inherited a mess created mutually by the Republicans and Democrats and everyone else in Washington who's been screwing up the system for years.
The result was this fake drama over "raising the debt ceiling" and with fake ideological stances over whether to have debt or not, etc.
The main thing to take from it is this fact: Over the weekend, even though the debt ceiling was raised, the S&P downgraded the U.S. credit rating to AA from AAA and Moody's threatened to also do so if the U.S. Government did not make steeper cuts in spending.
In other words, the banks and debt system are calling the shots and telling the U.S. Government what to do. And that's because the Federal Government has been malfeasant for years, resulting in huge deficits explicitly because of stupid Republican policies.
A July 13 Assoc Press report (Moody's Warns It May Downgrade US Credit Rating) goes over warning sounds Moody's was making a month ago. Today a Bloomberg News notes that Moody's and Fitch kept U.S. credit rating the same but "also said that downgrades were possible if lawmakers fail to enact debt reduction measures and the economy weakens." The same report also quotes two S&P analysts saying that the extremely difficult negotiations leading up to the credit limit deal last week were the primary cause S&P lowered the credit rating. That extremely divided "discussion" was not consistent with an AAA rating. (U.S. Loses AAA Credit Rating as S&P Slams Debt Levels, Political Process)
"More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating," S&P said. The Bloomberg report also said "S&P put the U.S. government on notice on April 18 that it risked losing the AAA rating it had since 1941 unless lawmakers agreed on a plan by 2013 to reduce budget deficits and the national debt. It indicated last month that anything less than $4 trillion in cuts would jeopardize the rating."
In other words, both S&P and Moody's are dictating to the Federal Government what the Federal Government policies must be. The state of affairs came about because the Federal Government has been ridiculous for years over an extreme level of relying on debt to finance the government. Note: I'm not saying it's because the Federal Government is over-spending, but that the government is relying on debt.
The problem with debt is you're wasting money on the interest payments, and as we see here it means the debt holder has power over you to control what decisions you can make.
It's not just a U.S. crisis, it's a global economic financial crisis. In Europe several countries are having severe problems, Spain and Italy being the current worry spots. A NY Times report mentions the European Central Bank was demanding Spain and Italy to "restructure their economies and cut spending".
(S.&P. Downgrade Is Seen as Adding Urgency to Debt-Cutting Panel) The debt ceiling crisis was resolved by creation of a Congressional "supercommittee" whose job is to "to mute ideological disagreements and recommend a package of deficit-reduction measures". That committee is now seen as having been given extra oomph by an S&P report released last week. The committee is described as having three roles, including "to appease the markets" and restore the AAA credit rating. "Appease the markets" can only mean one thing, right? To do what the market says, in other words the bond holders are calling the shots.
For example: If Congress wants to satisfy the rating agencies — Moody’s and Fitch have so far kept their AAA ratings of government debt — it will need to lock in substantial deficit-reduction measures, without using the kind of budgetary gimmicks that sometimes appear to produce savings under accounting rules prescribed by Congress, several lawmakers said.
(London Sees Twin Perils Converging to Fuel Riot) Over the weekend there was rioting in England. It was a small "anti-police demonstration" over the shooting of an Afro-Caribbean man in an area (Tottenham) that's full of disadvantaged Afro-Caribbean's. It might be nothing other than a riot over police brutality, except for this "Frustration in this impoverished neighborhood, as in many others in Britain, has mounted as the government’s austerity budget has forced deep cuts in social services." The point being that England elected a Conservative recently, who enacted a series of deep budget cuts to straighten out the country's finances, and now the people are rioting.

Other random quotes and links

"Policymakers around the world are trying to come up with a strategy to shore up market worries over the global economy and the levels of debt in the U.S. and Europe."
"S&P said the agencies and banks all have debt that is exposed to economic volatility and a further downgrade of long-term U.S. debt. Their creditworthiness hinges on the U.S. government's ability to pay its own creditors."

Markets Drop As Investors React To Downgrade
S&P Downgrades Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Ratings
Global Finance Leaders Pledge Bold Action to Calm Markets

Review: The End of America (Naomi Wolf)

Remember the mid-2000's when President Bush really was running roughshod over the laws of the United States of America, and working real hard to establish the basis for a real fascist regime over the United States? Maybe you did not know about this, but I'd written a bunch of posts on this which you can access via the category tags at the top of this post. The End of America is a 2008 movie by journalist Naomi Wolf which was at the time a strident urgent warning against the illegal excesses and overreach of the Bush II administration. Today, with Obama being slimed right and left as a 'Fascist' it's worth watching this movie as a reminder of our recent past.

The movie is structured around 10 steps Ms. Wolf has identified which dictatorial governments around the world use to put their population under autocratic rule. To explain each of the steps, Naomi uses examples of Bush II Administration actions that implement the steps.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Harass citizens' groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
7. Target key individuals.
8. Control the press.
9. Treat all political dissidents as traitors.
10. Suspend the rule of law.

Today, it would be a useful yardstick to compare the Bush II Administration excesses with the actions of the Obama Administration, to determine just how close Obama is to being an actual proto-Fascist as people are claiming.

The thing that I've noticed about the right wing blowhard Republicans is they tend to accuse others of the things they themselves are doing. Accusing Obama of Fascism would be par for the course, given the sort of autocratic tendencies the Republicans have followed since the Bush II years.
It's also true that the overreach by the Bush II Administration established principles of Presidential Behavior which the Obama Administration could be making use of. As one of the speakers in The End of America said, lost freedoms are like sand slipping between your fingers. The freedoms lost under the Bush Administration won't be automatically returned to we the people, instead we the people must fight to regain them.

One thing I'm wondering from watching this movie is to what extent it acted to inspire the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party people are activisting for a return to Constitutional Rule, and The End of America closes with a call for a return to Constitutional Rule. I suspect that the Tea Party people may have a different idea of Constitutional than does Naomi Wolf.

Interview - Naomi Wolf - Give Me Liberty - is a video interview of Ms. Wolf in 2008 discussing the movie, the book, the above stuff, etc

The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

In a stunning indictment of the Bush administration and Congress, best-selling author Naomi Wolf lays out her case for saving American democracy. In authoritative research and documentation Wolf explains how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century‚'s worst dictatorships such as Germany, Russia, China, and Chile.

The book cuts across political parties and ideologies and speaks directly to those among us who are concerned about the ever-tightening noose being placed around our liberties.

In this timely call to arms, Naomi Wolf compels us to face the way our free America is under assault. She warns us‚-with the straight-to-fellow-citizens urgency of one of Thomas Paine‚'s revolutionary pamphlets‚-that we have little time to lose if our children are to live in real freedom.

The End of America: Director's Cut

This two-disc director's cut is jam packed with never-before-seen bonus material, including: an exclusive interview with Anthony Romero, president of the ACLU; a detailed interview with Daniel Ellsberg, former military analyst; a featurette with New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, and much more. Along with the rest of America, best-selling author and feminist Naomi Wolf was overwhelmed by the swell of conflicting information and the sudden march to war after 9/11. Wolf looked to history to help her understand the dramatic changes she believed she was witnessing, and discovered the disturbing similarities between post-9/11 US policy and that of historically fascist regimes such as Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. Wolf authored her next book, THE END OF AMERICA, which demonstrated that the United States was on a remarkably certain path toward ending democracy. Taking the thesis of her book to the streets, Wolf set out on a national tour to discuss the evolution of America from a functional democracy into a closed, fear-driven society with a terrifying absence of due process. In this profound and eye-opening film, Award-winning veteran documentarians Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK, THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT) accompany Wolf as she discusses America's dangerous passage towards becoming a society of fear and surveillance, and expresses her plea to restore our nation's most cherished values.

Pondering the Dangers of eBooks warning from Richard Stallman

I'm planning to get into writing books using e-Book Publishing as the means to get published. Modern technology and the Internet have given us a very interesting opportunity for authors to have more freedom and ownership over their work in a way that hasn't been possible ever in the history of book publishing. At the same time these modern gizmos (Kindle's, Nooks, iPad's, etc) contain buried within them an implementation which endangers the freedom of information and the accepted norms we have as book consumers. Richard Stallman recently released a one page PDF outlining the freedom concerns related to electronic books as currently implemented, and calling for a different implementation that preserves the existing freedom model around printed books. I've embedded the document below and have a long list of thoughts about this.

I think the first topic to cover is the question: Why should we pay attention to this guy? Who is he? To me Richard Stallman is something of a hero who inspired legions of software engineers with software freedom ideology. He might cringe at the phrase but Open Source Software owes a lot to the thinking he did around the ideology of Free Software. Lest you wonder what Open Source Software is about, most of the websites you visit (like this one) are built using open source (or free) software, and so are most of the web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and to an extent Safari) as are the Linux or FreeBSD or Mac OS X operating systems built either entirely or in-part with open source (free) software.

He makes a distinction about Free Software as being different from Open Source, where Free Software is distributed under terms with baked-in guarantee of preserved freedom. Free Software isn't about the cost but about the Freedom.

While his career has been about applying this ideology of freedom to software, the same ideology can be applied in other areas, and the document he posted attempts to apply it to books.

The context is - as he puts it - business dominates government and writes the laws, so it shouldn't be surprising that the result is a weak government whose laws benefit businesses over the needs of we the people. In that context technology is being developed as businesses develop new products to dazzle us with, and time and again the products are being developed to chain us in bonds of enslavement rather than granting us freedom.

It may be difficult to look at an iPad or Kindle and see it as chains of enslavement, but the chains are there nonetheless.

He first describes the current book publishing and distributing system as having a lot of freedom. I've uploaded the document to scribd.com to enable embedding it and hopefully it's visible below, or you can download the PDF directly from his website (linked below). I find myself almost entirely agreeing with his claims:

buy anonymously with cash: Go to any bookstore where they sell printed books and quaint as it may seem today they do take cash. Buying with cash means your transaction is completely anonymous. This freedom is especially important in a time when the police state is for example routinely demanding to see records of book borrowing from libraries, or book purchases.

you own it: Here is one claim where Stallman is off base. I know he understands the word Copyright and would have to agree that when you buy a printed book you're not ending up with ownership of the words on the paper to do with as you wish. You've bought a pile of paper with ink printed on it, and because of Copyright the real owner of the book is the publishing house that printed the ink on the paper. I'm in the middle of writing a book myself and the contract I signed with the publisher includes turning over copyright over the material I'm writing.

not required to sign a license to use the book: Again, there is a Copyright on the book and while you don't sign a license agreement there is an implied pseudo click-through license.

known format, nothing proprietary to read it: Well this is true unless the book is written in a language you do not understand.

freedom to scan and copy the book: Here he's showing some disingenuousity regarding copyright. Copyright law generally prohibits wholesale scanning or copying of books.

Nobody has the power to destroy your book: Maybe he's forgotten about book burnings? While book burning is in the past, I think the religious right when/if they establish the Theocracy they want for America plan to hold massive book burnings of anything that doesn't agree with their brand of Christian Ideology.

The existing printed book system isn't quite as open and free as he puts it. Yes there's a lot of actual freedom such as the whole industry of used bookstores and the ability to trade books with your friends etc. But the main problem with printed book system is the control over who is allowed to be a book author. Publishers are in charge and act strongly to prohibit who can or cannot become published by dint of owning the printing press.

Electronic books offer authors quite a lot of newfound freedom. It's now possible for an author to just put together a document with their word processor, and go to any of several service bureaus to get books into the electronic book marketplaces. It's opened up opportunity galore for authors to become published.

At the same time, as he says, the existing electronic book system does erase the freedoms book consumers have enjoyed over the years. It's impossible to share an electronic book after you "buy" it, impossible to sell it on the used book market, impossible to return it to the store for a refund, etc. Further some electronic book market owners have used back door access to electronic book readers to change or delete books after they were purchased.

He's quite right in raising an alarm about the freedom our society has to access to information as it currently exists. I'm quite concerned by the situation of electronic books. At the same time I'm relishing the thought of much easier access to the marketplace as an author. It's a mixed set of freedoms and constraints.

The Danger of eBooks - Richard Stallman

Links: 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/57314192/The-Danger-of-eBooks-Richard-Stallman

Links: 

http://stallman.org/articles/ebooks.pdf

Wouldn't it be better to stop enabling dictators rather than bombing them when they turn evil?

Is it true that when all you have are bombs, everything starts to look like a target? The U.S. has a long history of supporting (giving money, weapons and training) to brutal dictatorships, and then having to turn our own military upon them later on. Maybe George Orwell was prescient in the book 1984 when he wrote about shifting alliances between world powers causing them to rewrite history books to justify warring against former allies. But it's ludicrous, wasteful and immoral to be propping up a government in one moment, and the next moment launching war against it in the next. But, it's happened time and again.

The current examples are Libya, Yemen, perhaps Bahrain, and this strained relationship with Pakistan. The most curious of those is Libya which was the subject of an article on Alternet.Org a couple months ago, which I posted on facebook, prompting a rather interesting exchange among some of my friends, which I've been meaning to write up ever since, and somehow even two months later the ideas are just as poignant as they were two months ago.

The article: Instead of Bombing Dictators in Libya and Around the World, Stop Selling Them Bombs It was written shortly after the wave of Facebook-fueled-Arab-protests-leading-to-toppled-Arab-governments landed in Libya, and rather than allow a popular uprising to topple his government Muammar Gaddafi responded with guns and tanks and airplanes turned upon Libya's own citizens. The "world community" responded with denunciations which over the course of a couple weeks turned into Western forces militarily supporting the "rebels" in Libya with cruise missles, and other air support, but no western boots touching Libya soil.

If your only memory of Libya is hearing them blamed for the Lockerbie bombing (an airplane that had an on-board bomb which blew up while the plane was above Lockerbie Scotland), or maybe being part of GW Bush's Axis of Evil, maybe you're confused to hear me describe them as a western ally. Fact is that a few years ago they foreswore their nuclear program and in exchange became allied with the Western conglomerate of countries. That put Libya on the gravy train of receiving Western assistance, including military assistance.

When President Barack Obama announced "we" would not "stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy, and ... where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government," the weapons being used by Gaddafi's troops had been sold to him by Western powers. Yes Obama's statement was eloquent and moving, but the hypocracy is poignant.

From the Alternet.Org article:

In 2009 alone, European governments -- including Britain and France -- sold Libya more than $470 million worth of weapons, including fighter jets, guns and bombs. And before it started calling for regime change, the Obama administration was working to provide the Libyan dictator another $77 million in weapons, on top of the $17 million it provided in 2009 and the $46 million the Bush administration provided in 2008.

And:

Meanwhile, for dictatorial regimes in Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, U.S. support continues to this day. On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even gave the U.S. stamp of approval to the brutal crackdown on protesters in Bahrain, saying the country’s authoritarian rulers “obviously” had the “sovereign right” to invite troops from Saudi Arabia to occupy their country and carry out human rights abuses, including attacks on injured protesters as they lay in their hospital beds.

The article went on to say Yemen "has received more than $300 million in military aid from the U.S. over the last five years" and it's not just the Yemeni government carrying out atrocities in Yemen, "one American bombing raid last year taking out 41 Yemeni civilians, including 14 women and 21 children". Further "The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute documented that Washington accounted for 54 percent of arms sales to Persian Gulf states between 2005 and 2009."

In other words, the U.S. is spending a lot of money supporting these dictatorial Arab governments, supplying them arms, and currently we see (in some cases) those arms being used against the civilian populations.

The article concludes "The U.S. government need not drop a single bomb in the Middle East to help liberate oppressed people. All it need do is stop selling bombs to their oppressors." Amen, for the record I agree completely.

Now, let's turn to the debate my friends had because they really captured three different points of view:

• me) we support the system as it is, warts and all, therefore because we don't join together to act to change the system that makes us responsible;
• Tony) yeah the system is flawed but our creeps are better than their creeps so that makes us okay;
• Bart) they aren't our creeps at all, and it's out of our hands because the real decisions are made by people who aren't responsible to our approval ...

Let's take Tony's position first. Nothing personal Tony, but I disagree of course. His argument is that for example Muburak (one of "our creeps") willingly stepped down while Gadaffi (never one of "our creeps") is mowing down civilians. Uh.. One of the factoids surrounding Egypt is their use of torture against their civilians and the 30+ years of military rule under emergency laws. Egypt is one of the countries to which the Bush Administration outsourced torture during the "extraordinary rendition" program. Torture is not something to be dismissed as "enhanced interrogation", torture is illegal. I found this article and am sure more could be found: WikiLeaks: Egyptian 'torturers' trained by FBI; The US provided officers from the Egyptian secret police with training at the FBI, despite allegations that they routinely tortured detainees and suppressed political opposition.

It's not just Egypt but there are plenty of other examples. One was that guy in Iraq we demonized and toppled his government a few years ago. A few years before that the U.S. was selling him arms, Donald Rumsfeld was shaking his hand, in the name of supporting Iraq in their war against Iran. But the same stuff the U.S. sold to Iraq was in turn used against their own population and then later was used as one of the lame excuses for the illegal invasion of Iraq whose purpose was to topple that government.

Pakistan is a weird example. We have treated them as an ally, but at the same time their head of nuclear weapons development was actively selling nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, Libya and other countries. At the same time Osama bin Laden was living in a luxury home in a military town in Pakistan, a curious location to find a man who was supposed to be hunkered down in a tent in the mountains shaking in his boots every time a drone aircraft flew overhead.

In other words - the history of this is not good, and to my mind creeps are creeps period. Hurm.. that may be a bit extreme because there are degrees of creephood and creeps can reform themselves. But, paying someone to be your creep doesn't mean they'll always be your creep. They may have changing alliances of their own which throws them out of favor with you. Or your changing alliances may convert them into an enemy.

Bart's position is rather pragmatic and I find it rather compelling. Basically the system is rigged against us little people. The system is run by the elites who have whatever agenda and they're acting to protect their business interests or whatnot, and our concerns don't enter their minds. They're playing global power games moving chess pieces around without realizing what the effects are.

Bart talked about "special interests" lobbying for particular government actions or policies. That it's the special interests skewing the results with these power games. Tony's response was "Is there any power structure that isn't surrounded by special interests?" He asked us to compare the Soviet era brutal governments, or North Korea's "communist fun house" against "our creeps". Those are great points.

As interesting as those examples are, I don't buy it. Where I stand is something akin to moral responsibility. Unlike Bart, I'm not willing to wash my hands of responsibility just because some elite is doing this without my approval.

Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq a series of anti-war protest rallies were held under the them of "Not in My Name". The idea is that it was recognized after the Sept 11 2001 attacks, that the Elites were going to use that as an excuse to launch an endless war against the military tactic known as Terrorism. How can you fight a war against a military tactic? Ludicrous. Anyway, 10 years later and it's obvious that indeed we're facing an endless state of war so that the military industrial complex can keep selling armaments. But the point of raising the "Not in My Name" meme is that the Elites doing this are doing it in our name. That is, the wars are being conducted under an assumption of approval and pretension that they're doing it for us for our benefit, when in reality they're doing it for their power games. The problem is there's no effective way of voicing disapproval and in any case half the country is in a state of delusion believing the lies spouted by the likes of Fox News.

To me it's clear - I'm participating in the system, even if the system is a charade. That puts responsibility for the system partially on me because. Because I disagree with the system as it stands what happens if I sit back into a cozy lifestyle offered to me? That's worse than being responsible, it's being irresponsible, especially when the system is causing such egregious political and environmental harm around the world. It's one thing to be dumb and ignorant about the harm our lifestyle is causing, it's another thing to know about it and do nothing.

Those "Not in my Name" protests asked us to say "You are not going to wage endless war in our name". That sort of stand is the beginning of taking responsibility for a different outcome than passively allowing the elites to run roughshod over the world.

Massey Energy is guilty responsible for the Big Branch mine explosion, and destroying West Virginia (Democracy Now)

Today's episode of Democracy Now went over a report which concluded that Massey Energy was culpable and responsible for the Big Branch mine explosion that killed almost 30 of its workers. Anybody who's paid half a bit of attention to this story will know that Massey and other coal mining companies have been screwing the political system with money to buy cooperation as they violate environmental protection laws, worker safety laws, and even common morality.

They have destroyed over 500 mountains in West Virginia (according to todays report) for the purpose of getting the coal underneath the mountains.

The other half of the show was an interview with the film-maker who produced a documentary, Last Mountain, talking about the extent of mountain destruction. That's where the "500 destroyed mountain" number comes from.

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/23/massey_energy_guilty_west_virginia_probe

J. DAVITT McATEER: The findings were threefold, mainly that the company operated in a way that disregarded the basic safety precautions needed to keep the mine safe, that the ventilation system was not maintained properly. The rock dust, that is used to keep an explosion from spreading, was not maintained and was not updated daily. And third is that the methane gas was not removed from the mine in an effective way, leading to, in fact, a perfect storm. When an ignition began on the long wall of the mine, it spread throughout the mine, kicked up the coal dust, and the coal dust then became a very violent explosion that killed the 29 miners.

J. DAVITT McATEER: We looked very carefully at what Massey has suggested, that it was this inundation. There had been three previous inundations, in '97, in 2003 and 2004. But we also looked at what would have happened had an inundation occurred. Their suggestion is a million cubic feet of natural gas flooded into the mine unexpectedly. If that had happened, the footprint of the explosion, what the explosion looked like afterwards, would have been much different than what the explosion looks like now. For example, the explosion's force would have been extremely powerful at the source of the infusion, where [inaudible]

J. DAVITT McATEER: Coal dust is created as you mine coal. It’s simply the dust that’s—as you grind the coal and put it onto a conveyor belt, it’s the coal—it’s the coal that’s broken into fine particles, and it falls onto the ground. How it can be prevented from exploding is the addition of rock dust, which is essentially ground-up limestone that’s laid with the coal dust, and that limestone lowers the explosion rate that the coal dust can have, so that you can make it not explosive. The failure to have a rock-dusting system that was in operation at the time, the failure to keep rock dusting in place, was a basic, fundamental safety failure that every industry—every representative of the industry knows. Have to do that to keep an explosion from spreading throughout the mine.

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/23/fight_over_coal_mining_is_a

BILL HANEY: Well, The Last Mountain is a film about the fight for the last great mountain in Central Appalachia between the mining company Massey, that wants to blow it up and strip the coal inside, and the locals, who want to stop them and build a wind farm on top instead. And it’s a story about citizen democracy. It’s about the extraordinary group of, you know, waitresses and former Marines and former coal miners, who have come together and enlisted the help of folks like Bobby Kennedy, Jr., to try to fight for their rights. And it’s a story about the future of energy, because the ugly paw of the coal industry lies heavy upon our political system and on our environment. So that’s why we called it The Last Mountain, because they’ve already knocked down, with explosives the size of a Hiroshima bomb being dropped on Appalachia every week—they’ve already taken 500 of these mountains down to rubble and dumped the residuals into the rivers, contaminating 2,000 miles of federal river, and there’s not much left.

BILL HANEY: Well, I think that Massey controls all the mountains in the Coal River Valley, including Coal River Mountain that’s at the center of our story. It’s the largest practitioner of this most egregious form of mining, mountaintop removal. And it’s been operated in a way that seems to be wildly beyond the bounds of federal constraint and state constraint for quite some time. So their history of safety violations and environmental violations is so long as to be dizzying. And they, you know, for many, many years appear to have decided that it was less expensive to pay the fines and sort out something with the political system than it was to actually comply with the environmental rules or the Clean Water Act or safety standards....

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: I’ve been involved in the industry, in the coal industry in West Virginia, on and off for 27 years. I was invited down about three or four years ago by the local group at Coal Mountain to help them in their battle to save this last mountain, as Bill says.

Massey Coal is the third largest coal company in the country, but it is by far the biggest practitioner of mountaintop removal mining. Over the past decade, they have leveled an area of the Appalachians the size of Delaware, 1.4 million acres. They’ve cut down 500 of the biggest mountains in the state. And they’ve buried, as Bill said, thousands of miles of rivers and streams.

They have to break the law to do this. They cannot survive in the marketplace without violating the law. They violate labor laws. They violate health and safety laws. And by their own records, they’ve had some 67,000 violations of just one of the environmental statutes....