Tag: ek Politics

William Bratton is the two time Commissioner of the NYPD and if he seems enlightened at all it’s simply by comparison with his predecessor- convicted felon Bernard Kerik (“In 2009 Kerik pleaded guilty before U.S. federal prosecutors to 8 charges including criminal conspiracy, tax fraud, and lying under oath. Kerik was sentenced to four years in federal prison on February 18, 2010.”).

While not the first person to espouse the “Broken Windows” doctrine of policing (strict enforcement of minor “quality of life” regulations will reduce major crimes) he is certainly closely associated with the movement and is one of its most public advocates.

Like Neo-Liberal Economics and Charter Schools what we find in this real life experiment that has ruined millions of lives is that it’s hardly effective at all, provides myriad opportunities for graft and corruption, and is mostly merely thinly veiled racism.

The NYPD’s ‘Work Stoppage’ Is Surreal

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

December 31, 2014

Furious at embattled mayor Bill de Blasio, and at what Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch calls a “hostile anti-police environment in the city,” the local officers are simply refusing to arrest or ticket people for minor offenses – such arrests have dropped off a staggering 94 percent, with overall arrests plunging 66 percent.

If you’re wondering exactly what that means, the Post is reporting that the protesting police have decided to make arrests “only when they have to.” (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously, take 10 or 15 seconds).

Substantively that mostly means a steep drop-off in parking tickets, but also a major drop in tickets for quality-of-life offenses like carrying open containers of alcohol or public urination.

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I don’t know any police officer anywhere who would refuse to arrest a truly dangerous criminal as part of a PBA-led political gambit. So the essence of this protest seems now to be about trying to hit de Blasio where it hurts, i.e. in the budget, without actually endangering the public.

So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different constituencies about modern law-enforcement tactics.

First, it shines a light on the use of police officers to make up for tax shortfalls using ticket and citation revenue. Then there’s the related (and significantly more important) issue of forcing police to make thousands of arrests and issue hundreds of thousands of summonses when they don’t “have to.”

It’s incredibly ironic that the police have chosen to abandon quality-of-life actions like public urination tickets and open-container violations, because it’s precisely these types of interactions that are at the heart of the Broken Windows polices that so infuriate residents of so-called “hot spot” neighborhoods.

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It would be amazing if this NYPD protest somehow brought parties on all sides to a place where we could all agree that policing should just go back to a policy of officers arresting people “when they have to.”

Because it’s wrong to put law enforcement in the position of having to make up for budget shortfalls with parking tickets, and it’s even more wrong to ask its officers to soak already cash-strapped residents of hot spot neighborhoods with mountains of summonses as part of a some stats-based crime-reduction strategy.

Both policies make people pissed off at police for the most basic and understandable of reasons: if you’re running into one, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to end up opening your wallet.

Your average summons for a QOL offense costs more than an ordinary working person makes in a day driving a bus, waiting tables, or sweeping floors. So every time you nail somebody, you’re literally ruining their whole day.

If I were a police officer, I’d hate to be taking money from people all day long, too. Christ, that’s worse than being a dentist. So under normal circumstances, this slowdown wouldn’t just make sense, it would be heroic.

Unfortunately, this protest is not about police refusing to shake people down for money on principle.

You may recognize this “revenue extraction policing” from Ferguson, Missouri.

Police Reportedly Say They Aren’t Making Arrests After Cop Killings

By Simon McCormack, The Huffington Post

12/30/2014 10:00 pm EST

But the drop in arrests could be worse news for NYPD Chief Bill Bratton than it is for those protesting police misconduct.

Bratton helped pioneer the “broken windows” approach of policing. Proponents of the broken windows theory believe that law enforcement cracking down on low-level offenses leads to a drop in more serious crimes.

The theory is controversial and its effectiveness has been repeatedly cast into doubt.

Even criminologist James Q. Wilson, one of the originators of the broken windows theory, describes it as “a speculation.”

“I still to this day do not know if improving order will or will not reduce crime,” Wilson said in 2004.

Those who have protested the recent deaths of Eric Garner and other African-Americans at the hands of police have explicitly criticized broken windows policing.

It was an attempt to arrest Eric Garner for the low-level offense of allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes that, a coroner’s report said, led to his death.

At a rally earlier this month, the chant, “Broken windows, broken lives,” could be heard echoing in the streets.

The Benefits of Fewer NYPD Arrests

Matt Ford, The Atlantic

Dec 31 2014, 9:21 AM ET

But the police union’s phrasing-officers shouldn’t make arrests “unless absolutely necessary”-begs the question: How many unnecessary arrests was the NYPD making before now?

Policing quality doesn’t necessarily increase with policing quantity, as New York’s experience with stop-and-frisk demonstrated. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg asserted that the controversial tactic of warrantless street searches “keeps New York City safe.” De Blasio ended the program soon after succeeding him, citing its discriminatory impact on black and Hispanic residents. Stop-and-frisk incidents plunged from 685,724 stops in 2011 to just 38,456 in the first three-quarters of 2014 as a result. If stop-and-frisk had caused the ongoing decline in New York’s crime rate, its near-absence would logically halt or even reverse that trend. But the city seems to be doing just fine without it: Crime rates are currently at two-decade lows, with homicide down 7 percent and robberies down 14 percent since 2013.

The slowdown also challenges the fundamental tenets of broken-windows policing, a controversial strategy championed by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton. According to the theory, which first came to prominence in a 1982 article in The Atlantic, “quality-of-life” crimes like vandalism and vagrancy help normalize criminal behavior in neighborhoods and precede more violent offenses. Tackling these low-level offenses therefore helps prevent future ones. The theory’s critics dispute its effectiveness and contend that broken-windows policing simply criminalizes the young, the poor, and the homeless.

Public drinking and urination may be unseemly, but they’re hardly threats to life, liberty, or public order. (The Post also noted a decline in drug arrests, but their comparison of 2013 and 2014 rates is misleading. The mayor’s office announced in November that police would stop making arrests for low-level marijuana possession and issue tickets instead. Even before the slowdown began, marijuana-related arrests had declined by 61 percent.) If the NYPD can safely cut arrests by two-thirds, why haven’t they done it before?

The human implications of this question are immense. Fewer arrests for minor crimes logically means fewer people behind bars for minor crimes. Poorer would-be defendants benefit the most; three-quarters of those sitting in New York jails are only there because they can’t afford bail. Fewer New Yorkers will also be sent to Rikers Island, where endemic brutality against inmates has led to resignations, arrests, and an imminent federal civil-rights intervention over the past six months. A brush with the American criminal-justice system can be toxic for someone’s socioeconomic and physical health.

The NYPD might benefit from fewer unnecessary arrests, too. Tensions between the mayor and the police unions originally intensified after a grand jury failed to indict a NYPD officer for the chokehold death of Eric Garner during an arrest earlier this year. Garner’s arrest wasn’t for murder or arson or bank robbery, but on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes-hardly the most serious of crimes. Maybe the NYPD’s new “absolutely necessary” standard for arrests would have produced a less tragic outcome for Garner then. Maybe it will for future Eric Garners too.

Oh, and speaking of false economies, New York City spends some Tens of Millions each year in private settlements of Police Brutality cases to place the abused victims under gag orders and ensure Police are not prosecuted.

“Broken Windows Policing”, like the rest of the Neo-Liberal agenda, is a complete, utter, and proven failure.  As I said yesterday–

After 10 years you should know me better.  The class war is raging all around you, naked in tooth and claw.  Our elite overlords are just as corrupt, stupid, and evil as the Ancien Régime and deserve the same contempt.  Each year I make only one resolution-

To be even more obnoxious.

Happy New Year!

Matt Taibbi and “The $9 Billion Witness” Who Exposed How JPMorgan Chase Helped Wreck the Economy

Who Goes to Jail? Matt Taibbi on “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap”

READ: Matt Taibbi on “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap”

One of the key components of a secure and private Internet connection is The Onion Relay Project, commonly known as Tor after its browser, a variation of the popular open source Firefox.

Recently the FBI announced that it had arrested 17 people and brought down over 400 sites including the infamous “Silk Road 2.0”.

Does that mean Tor is broken?  Not so much apparently.

Did the FBI Break Tor?

By Naomi Gingold, Slate

Dec. 8 2014 8:49 AM

This past July Tor announced it had shut down a five-month-long combined “Sybil” and “traffic confirmation attack,” allegedly carried out by researchers at CERT, a computer security research institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

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A traffic confirmation attack is one of the most well-known ways to assault Tor. To carry it out, you need to be able to control the first and last relays of Tor circuits. Once in control, you secretly tag data packets when they enter the network and check those tags when they exit. This way you can figure out who is talking to whom.

A common way to gain control of those relays is through a “Sybil attack,” where you flood the system with your own relays, so that you can dominate parts of the network. (Recent research shows that it’s not that expensive to do this; after all, there are only 6,000-plus relays currently on Tor.) This Sybil attack exploits an inherit vulnerability of Tor’s design: its reliance on volunteers to create the network.

As it turns out the FBI was able to make these cases through traditional police methods (finding a weak link in the organization and threatening and lying to them in order to get them to implicate others).  However another group, the Lizard Squad (best known for hacking game servers and consoles), has also been attempting to compromise Tor security using a Sybil attack.

The Attack on the Hidden Internet

Marc Rogers, The Daily Beast

12/29/14

Most recently, it’s Tor’s ability to provide websites with a private “onion” address that has been hitting the headlines. “Onion” addresses are private addresses that can only be reached after connecting through Tor’s layers of anonymity. Ordinary Web browsers can’t see the site, in other words-protecting it from government censors. Seen both as a way to make websites used by activists accessible in countries governed by hostile regimes and as a way to host websites carrying illegal products and services, this part of the Tor network is now known as a central component of the “darknet” or “deep web.”

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Over the space of a few hours on Friday, Lizard Squad registered a little more than 3,000 Tor relays. Relays are special computers that Tor uses to anonymously transmit traffic across the Internet. Comprised entirely of volunteered machines, the larger and more distributed this network of relays is, the better for the network and its users. So it’s understandable that the Tor folks wanted to make it as easy as possible to add new relays to the network, allowing it to grow. However, it appears it is this very open nature that the Lizard Squad is attempting to exploit.

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Networks like Tor have long been considered to be vulnerable to an attack known as a “Sybil” attack, named after the famous 1973 book about the woman suffering from multiple personality disorder. The attack relies on flooding the network with fake nodes, or identities, until enough of them are present that the operator of those fake nodes can use them to influence or control the network. It’s like poisoning a party by overloading it with assholes.

Just how many fake nodes would be needed in order to pull off a successful Sybil attack against Tor is not known. Luckily, Tor was prepared for this sort of assault, and has built-in defenses to protect against it.

Tor’s administrators have to allow new nodes to connect and play a trusted role in the network. So to enable this while protecting the network, it has a system of evaluation that cycles the new node through several distinct phases before loading it up with traffic. This means that for the first few days the node essentially sees no traffic until the network is confident about it and its reliability.

As a result, while the 3,021 nodes added by Lizard Squad looked like a significant chunk of Tor’s more than 6,000-node network, they actually carried less than 1 percent of Tor’s traffic. Most importantly, they were all deleted long before that percentage could rise any higher. So, while Lizard Squad’s latest attack against the Internet’s most important anonymity network is troublesome, it was also completely harmless-this time. There is a lot of residual concern that Lizard Squad was able to get even this far. One of the biggest concerns is that if they had been more patient and subtler about how they executed this attack, it’s possible that they could have added relays slowly, across a wide range of networks, in such a way that they became trusted integral parts of the Tor network. At that point, who knows what they could have been capable of.

Even so the Tor browser when properly used and end-to-end encryption are the best way to protect yourself against casual snooping, including by Government Agencies.  How do we know this?  Der Spiegel has just published a piece based on the Snowden Papers showing the “threat” (meaning difficulty in illegally spying on you) the NSA considers various practices and programs.

Prying Eyes: Inside the NSA’s War on Internet Security

By Jacob Appelbaum, Aaron Gibson, Christian Grothoff, Andy Müller-Maguhn, Laura Poitras, Michael Sontheimer and Christian Stöcker, Der Spiegel

12/28/14

For the NSA, encrypted communication — or what all other Internet users would call secure communication — is “a threat”. In one internal training document viewed by SPIEGEL, an NSA employee asks: “Did you know that ubiquitous encryption on the Internet is a major threat to NSA’s ability to prosecute digital-network intelligence (DNI) traffic or defeat adversary malware?”

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The Snowden documents reveal the encryption programs the NSA has succeeded in cracking, but, importantly, also the ones that are still likely to be secure. Although the documents are around two years old, experts consider it unlikely the agency’s digital spies have made much progress in cracking these technologies. “Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” Snowden said in June 2013, after fleeing to Hong Kong.

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As one document from the Snowden archive shows, the NSA had been unsuccessful in attempts to decrypt several communications protocols, at least as of 2012. An NSA presentation for a conference that took place that year lists the encryption programs the Americans failed to crack. In the process, the NSA cryptologists divided their targets into five levels corresponding to the degree of the difficulty of the attack and the outcome, ranging from “trivial” to “catastrophic.”

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Things first become troublesome at the fourth level. The presentation states that the NSA encounters “major” problems in its attempts to decrypt messages sent through heavily encrypted email service providers like Zoho or in monitoring users of the Tor network*, which was developed for surfing the web anonymously. Tor, otherwise known as The Onion Router, is free and open source software that allows users to surf the web through a network of more than 6,000 linked volunteer computers. The software automatically encrypts data in a way that ensures that no single computer in the network has all of a user’s information. For surveillance experts, it becomes very difficult to trace the whereabouts of a person who visits a particular website or to attack a specific person while they are using Tor to surf the Web.

The NSA also has “major” problems with Truecrypt, a program for encrypting files on computers. Truecrypt’s developers stopped their work on the program last May, prompting speculation about pressures from government agencies. A protocol called Off-the-Record (OTR) for encrypting instant messaging in an end-to-end encryption process also seems to cause the NSA major problems. Both are programs whose source code can be viewed, modified, shared and used by anyone. Experts agree it is far more difficult for intelligence agencies to manipulate open source software programs than many of the closed systems developed by companies like Apple and Microsoft. Since anyone can view free and open source software, it becomes difficult to insert secret back doors without it being noticed. Transcripts of intercepted chats using OTR encryption handed over to the intelligence agency by a partner in Prism — an NSA program that accesses data from at least nine American internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple — show that the NSA’s efforts appear to have been thwarted in these cases: “No decrypt available for this OTR message.” This shows that OTR at least sometimes makes communications impossible to read for the NSA.

Things become “catastrophic” for the NSA at level five – when, for example, a subject uses a combination of Tor, another anonymization service, the instant messaging system CSpace and a system for Internet telephony (voice over IP) called ZRTP. This type of combination results in a “near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence,” the NSA document states.

ZRTP, which is used to securely encrypt conversations and text chats on mobile phones, is used in free and open source programs like RedPhone and Signal. “It’s satisfying to know that the NSA considers encrypted communication from our apps to be truly opaque,” says RedPhone developer Moxie Marlinspike.

Also, the “Z” in ZRTP stands for one of its developers, Phil Zimmermann, the same man who created Pretty Good Privacy, which is still the most common encryption program for emails and documents in use today. PGP is more than 20 years old, but apparently it remains too robust for the NSA spies to crack. “No decrypt available for this PGP encrypted message,” a further document viewed by SPIEGEL states of emails the NSA obtained from Yahoo.

Phil Zimmermann wrote PGP in 1991. The American nuclear weapons freeze activist wanted to create an encryption program that would enable him to securely exchange information with other like-minded individuals. His system quickly became very popular among dissidents around the world. Given its use outside the United States, the US government launched an investigation into Zimmermann during the 1990s for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act. Prosecutors argued that making encryption software of such complexity available abroad was illegal. Zimmermann responded by publishing the source code as a book, an act that was constitutionally protected as free speech.

PGP continues to be developed and various versions are available today. The most widely used is GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG), a program developed by German programmer Werner Koch. One document shows that the Five Eyes intelligence services sometimes use PGP themselves. The fact is that hackers obsessed with privacy and the US authorities have a lot more in common than one might initially believe. The Tor Project, was originally developed with the support of the US Naval Research Laboratory.

Today, NSA spies and their allies do their best to subvert the system their own military helped conceive, as a number of documents show. Tor deanonymization is obviously high on the list of NSA priorities, but the success achieved here seems limited. One GCHQ document from 2011 even mentions trying to decrypt the agencies’ own use of Tor — as a test case.

To a certain extent, the Snowden documents should provide some level of relief to people who thought nothing could stop the NSA in its unquenchable thirst to collect data. It appears secure channels still exist for communication. Nevertheless, the documents also underscore just how far the intelligence agencies already go in their digital surveillance activities.

Having used Tor on an experimental basis I’ll tell you the experience is very much like moving from 98 SE to XP 64 in that it’s mostly notable for the many things you used to do and programs that used to work that simply don’t anymore because they’re insecure.  Now this is either an insurmountable hardship for you or it isn’t.  I’ve found that as time progresses I have less and less use for my old stuff which I still have available anyway on my dusty machines that worked until I turned them off.

Weaponizing Health Workers: How Medical Professionals Were a Top Instrument in U.S. Torture Program

Ex-Bush Official: U.S. Tortured Prisoners to Produce False Intel that Built Case for Iraq War

Bush & Cheney Should Be Charged with War Crimes Says Col. Wilkerson, Former Aide to Colin Powell

A reprint from 2007 but as true today as it ever was.

As U.S. troops return to Iraq, more private contractors follow

By Warren Strobel and Phil Stewart, Reuters

WASHINGTON Wed Dec 24, 2014 1:17am EST

The U.S. government is preparing to boost the number of private contractors in Iraq as part of President Barack Obama’s growing effort to beat back Islamic State militants threatening the Baghdad government, a senior U.S. official said.

How many contractors will deploy to Iraq – beyond the roughly 1,800 now working there for the U.S. State Department – will depend in part, the official said, on how widely dispersed U.S. troops advising Iraqi security forces are, and how far they are from U.S. diplomatic facilities.

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The presence of contractors in Iraq, particularly private security firms, has been controversial since a series of violent incidents during the U.S. occupation, culminating in the September 2007 killing of 14 unarmed Iraqis by guards from Blackwater security firm.

Three former guards were convicted in October of voluntary manslaughter charges and a fourth of murder in the case, which prompted reforms in U.S. government oversight of contractors.

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The number of Pentagon contractors, which in late 2008 reached over 163,000 – rivaling the number of U.S. troops on the ground at the time – has fallen sharply with reduced U.S. military presence.

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In late 2013, the Pentagon still had 6,000 contractors in Iraq, mostly supporting U.S. weapon sales to the Baghdad government, Wright said.

But there are signs that trend will be reversed. The Pentagon in August issued a public notice that it was seeking help from private firms to advise Iraq’s Ministry of Defense and its Counter Terrorism Service.

From Wikipedia’s entry on the American Revolutionary War

Early in 1775, the British Army consisted of about 36,000 men worldwide… Additionally, over the course of the war the British hired about 30,000 soldiers from German princes, these soldiers were called “Hessians” because many of them came from Hesse-Kassel. The troops were mercenaries in the sense of professionals who were hired out by their prince. Germans made up about one-third of the British troop strength in North America.

On December 26th 1776 after being chased by the British army under Lords Howe and Cornwallis augmented by these “Hessians” led by Wilhelm von Knyphausen from Brooklyn Heights to the other side of the Delaware the fate of the Continental Army and thus the United States looked bleak.  The Continental Congress abandoned Philidephia, fleeing to Baltimore.  It was at this time Thomas Paine was inspired to write The Crisis.

The story of Washington’s re-crossing of the Delaware to successfully attack the “Hessian” garrison at Trenton is taught to every school child.

On March 31, 2004 Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah ambushed a convoy containing four American private military contractors from Blackwater USA.

The four armed contractors, Scott Helvenston, Jerko Zovko, Wesley Batalona and Michael Teague, were dragged from their cars, beaten, and set ablaze. Their burned corpses were then dragged through the streets before being hung over a bridge crossing the Euphrates.

Of this incident the next day prominent blogger Markos Moulitsas notoriously said-

Every death should be on the front page (2.70 / 40)

Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly.

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

(From Corpses on the Cover by gregonthe28th.  This link directly to the comment doesn’t work for some reason.)

Now I think that this is a reasonable sentiment that any patriotic American with a knowledge of history might share.

Why bring up this old news again, two days from the 231st anniversary of the Battle of Trenton?

Warnings Unheeded On Guards In Iraq

^{Despite Shootings, Security Companies Expanded Presence}

By Steve Fainaru, Washington Post Foreign Service

Monday, December 24, 2007; A01

The U.S. government disregarded numerous warnings over the past two years about the risks of using Blackwater Worldwide and other private security firms in Iraq, expanding their presence even after a series of shooting incidents showed that the firms were operating with little regulation or oversight, according to government officials, private security firms and documents.

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Last year, the Pentagon estimated that 20,000 hired guns worked in Iraq; the Government Accountability Office estimated 48,000.

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The Defense Department has paid $2.7 billion for private security since 2003, according to USA Spending, a government-funded project that tracks contracting expenditures; the military said it currently employs 17 companies in Iraq under contracts worth $689.7 million. The State Department has paid $2.4 billion for private security in Iraq — including $1 billion to Blackwater — since 2003, USA Spending figures show.

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The State Department’s reliance on Blackwater expanded dramatically in 2006, when together with the U.S. firms DynCorp and Triple Canopy it won a new, multiyear contract worth $3.6 billion. Blackwater’s share was $1.2 billion, up from $488 million, and the company more than doubled its staff, from 482 to 1,082. From January 2006 to April 2007, the State Department paid Blackwater at least $601 million in 38 transactions, according to government data.

The company developed a reputation for aggressive street tactics. Even inside the fortified Green Zone, Blackwater guards were known for running vehicles off the road and pointing their weapons at bystanders, according to several security company representatives and U.S. officials.

Based on insurance claims there are only 25 confirmed deaths of Blackwater employees in Iraq, including the four killed in Fallujah.  You might care to contrast that with the 17 Iraqis killed on September 16th alone.  Then there are the 3 Kurdish civilians in Kirkuk on February 7th of 2006.  And the three employees of the state-run media company and the driver for the Interior Ministry.

And then exactly one year ago today, on Christmas Eve 2006, a Blackwater mercenary killed the body guard of Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi while drunk at a Christmas party (the mercenary, not the guard or Vice President Abdul-Mahdi who were both presumably observant Muslims and no more likely to drink alcohol than Mitt Romney to drink tea).

Sort of makes all those embarrassing passes you made at co-workers and the butt Xeroxes at the office party seem kind of trivial, now doesn’t it?

So that makes it even at 25 apiece except I’ve hardly begun to catalog the number of Iraqis killed by trigger happy Blackwater mercenaries.

They say irony is dead and I (and Santayana) say that the problem with history is that people who don’t learn from it are doomed to repeat it.

Inside Wall Street’s new heist: How big banks exploited a broken Democratic caucus

David Dayen, Salon

Tuesday, Dec 16, 2014 02:45 PM EST

The so-called swaps push-out provision of Dodd-Frank, Section 716, forced commercial banks that trade certain risky types of derivatives to split them off into a separately capitalized subsidiary, uncovered by FDIC deposit insurance. Those attempting to downplay Section 716’s importance, like Paul Krugman, highlight the fact that uninsured institutions like Lehman Brothers played a critical role in the last crisis, and that risk can cascade through an interconnected financial system no matter where those risks are initially housed. This theory actually made it easier to get the rider through Congress, giving lawmakers a plausible story that the provision wasn’t central to reform.

But this overlooks how 716 didn’t just limit taxpayer bailouts, but removed a lucrative subsidy for the four major banks – Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs – that control almost all of the derivatives market. By holding derivatives inside their depository units, these banks benefit from an implicit FDIC guarantee for its counter-parties should those units fail. Keeping them in separately capitalized entities costs the banks more in short-term borrowing. As the Wall Street Journal’s John Carney points out, the banks’ parent companies have lower credit ratings than the depository units, which affects the price banks can ask for derivatives.

So in the end, removing 716 just gives four banks a giant subsidy they would lose by splitting out the derivatives books, no different than the other CRomnibus riders that aid the bottom lines of wealthy benefactors. That has implications for safety as well – if risky derivatives are cheaper to fund and more profitable to trade, banks will increase their production. Furthermore, banks’ concerns about possible energy swap losses related to the crash in oil prices added a sense of urgency.

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The origins of eliminating Section 716 go back to the writing of Dodd-Frank itself. Blanche Lincoln, author of the derivatives regulations in the bill, initially included practically all swaps. A combination of lobbyists, Wall Street-friendly “New Democrats” and the Treasury Department significantly rolled that back, limiting it to the riskiest bits, like credit default swaps that don’t go through a clearinghouse.

After wounding the provision, the banks employed their allies in Congress to disappear it entirely. A bipartisan coalition, including Jim Himes, D-Conn., a former vice president at Goldman Sachs, introduced a host of bills to weaken derivatives rules as far back as 2011. HR 992, the “Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act,” sailed through the House Financial Services Committee 53-6 in spring 2013. The language of this bill, written by Citigroup lobbyists, is virtually identical to what passed in the CRomnibus. Rep. Maxine Waters, the ranking member on the Democratic side, waged a fairly lonely battle to limit Democratic support. On the House floor, 70 Democrats voted for the final bill, far fewer than was initially expected. This enabled Senate Democrats to ignore the bill as a stand-alone entity.

House Republicans, egged on by Wall Street lobbyists, tried another tactic. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., a two-term member of the House Appropriations subcommittee overseeing financial services, stuck HR 992 into the financial services appropriations bill without a formal vote, pitching it as an aid to “the farmer in your district who wants to get a loan,” rather than Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein. Nobody ever tried to strip it out, and the rider easily advanced through the process.

Stuffing the rollback into a must-pass bill turned out to be a genius move. Lawmakers on the Appropriations committees have less understanding of complex bank maneuvers like derivatives than those on the banking committees. Furthermore, because all parties expected a year-end omnibus bill anyway, it didn’t make as much sense to fight every little provision, when a negotiated process would cover that down the road.

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Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., the outgoing chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, negotiated the CRomnibus with her House counterpart Hal Rogers, R-Ky. She ultimately signed off on the rider, in exchange for modest additional funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, two Wall Street regulators.

Bank reform groups and sympathetic lawmakers didn’t consider it a good trade to give a couple of regulators a bit more money in exchange for limiting what they can regulate.

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Senate leaders had to know that this swaps provision, for example, would cause plenty of consternation among colleagues like Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. But they gave Mikulski all the space she needed to negotiate, and then pronounced themselves satisfied with the results. This stands in sharp contrast to Ron Wyden on the Senate Finance Committee, who watched Harry Reid go completely over his head in trying to negotiate a year-end tax deal.

Why did Mikulski get the hands-off treatment? For one, she’s earned respect as a longtime senator. Also, the leadership probably welcomed keeping their fingerprints off the final product, which was bound to be ugly. Establishment Democrats, including the White House, never really liked Section 716 to begin with, so they weren’t too displeased with watching it go, regardless of the blueprint it provided for repealing regulatory actions inside budget bills.

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(T)his shows real dysfunction in how Democrats work. Giving Mikulski carte blanche led to an embarrassing deal that revealed real fissures within the party caucus. The leadership should have seen this coming, but either let it happen or actively participated in the rollback (a claim from the Wall Street Journal editorial board that Chuck Schumer “engineered” the swaps provision had to be retracted within hours).

More important, the leadership failed to listen to the liberal wing, who were loudly and publicly opposed to the swaps rider. This is a familiar refrain from liberal congressional aides; their side of the argument never gets represented at the negotiating table.

The hardening conventional wisdom is that Wall Street lost more than it won with its power play on the CRomnibus, because it revealed itself as a giant liberal target. Mainstream Democrats definitely underestimated the strength liberal reformers brought to the fight, so maybe future actions will be undertaken with that in mind.

But it’s just as likely that the establishment didn’t mind the outcome, letting them look like the sensible centrists “getting something done.” That was probably the motivation behind President Obama ultimately endorsing and even whipping for the bill.

Whatever the outcome, we know that Wall Street exploited a fractured Democratic caucus to restore a big subsidy to its profits. And if Democrats don’t contend with that – or worse, if they don’t want to – you can expect many more congressional victories for the financial sector.

Democrats Bow Down to Wall Street

Bill Moyers & John R. MacArthur, president and publisher of Harper’s Magazine, Moyers & Company

December 12, 2014

You say if he wins the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he’ll be giving away big chunks of our remaining manufacturing base to Japan and Vietnam and other Pacific Rim countries. Why does he want to do that?

Because he’s the fundraiser in chief. And again, this goes back to Bill Clinton. Because Obama’s really just imitating Bill Clinton. Clinton made an alliance with the Daley machine in Chicago, which Obama, he’s inherited that alliance with the two Daley brothers. The people who were thriving are the people in power. Rahm Emanuel is now mayor of Chicago. Bill Daley and Rahm Emanuel were the chief lobbyists for passing NAFTA under Clinton. They’re the ones who rounded up the votes. They’re the ones who made the deals with the recalcitrant Democrats and Republicans who didn’t want to vote for it. These people are in the saddle.

Full Transcript

The good news is that even Politico is beginning to realize that Alberta Tar Sands are not economically sound and will cost more to extract than they are worth.

Also 2 interviews from Democracy Now at COP 20 in Lima.

Former VP Al Gore Urges Obama to Reject Keystone XL as Kerry, Top U.S. Negotiator Stay Mum

Pipe Dreams? Labor Researchers Say Keystone XL Project May Kill More Jobs Than It Creates

Will cheap oil kill Keystone?

By Elana Schor, Politico

12/15/14 5:35 AM EST

The same collapse in oil prices that is pumping dollars into motorists’ wallets also risks undermining the case for building the 1,179-mile pipeline in two crucial ways: It’s squeezing the western Canadian oil industry that has looked to Keystone as its most promising route to the Gulf Coast. And anti-pipeline activists hope that falling prices will make it politically safer for Obama to reject the project, despite the new Republican Congress’ pledges to put Keystone at the top of its 2015 energy agenda.

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U.S. oil prices have plunged by nearly half since late June, tumbling to around $58 a barrel on Friday, thanks to the refusal of OPEC to cut production amid a glut of global supplies. Gasoline prices have fallen to a five-year low at the same time, reaching a national average of $2.60 a gallon Friday morning.

The oil price is crucial to the Keystone debate because the latest State Department environmental study on the project says prices in the $65-to-$75 range are a potential danger zone for oil production in western Canada – the point where transportation costs driven higher by failing to build the pipeline could “have a substantial impact on” the industry’s growth.

Cheaper oil also makes it easier to blame Keystone for the greenhouse gases that the Canadian oil fields send into the atmosphere. The State Department study said Keystone would be blameless for all that carbon because Canada is likely to keep pumping more oil even without the pipeline, sending the crude to the U.S. by truck or train if necessary. But the rail and truck options are more expensive – so if cheap oil makes them no longer cost-effective, greens argue, the pipeline would be the thing that keeps the pollution coming.

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“It is now impossible to credibly argue that Keystone XL won’t enable significant expansion of the tar sands and associated climate emissions,” Natural Resources Defense Council international program attorney Anthony Swift said by email. “Plummeting global oil prices have highlighted the fact that tar sands only work in a world of expensive crude – and without cheap pipeline infrastructure, many carbon-intensive tar sands projects simply will not be built.”

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Canada’s heavy-fuel producers are facing a cash crunch as cheap crude chokes profits for some of the industry’s most expensive new projects, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared last week that trying to regulate oil emissions during the current price crash would be “crazy economic policy.”

Everywhere you look in the region, companies are cutting back: The company Canadian Oil Sands sliced its 2015 budget nearly in half compared with this year’s spending. Baytex slashed its dividends to stockholders by more than half, announcing a focus on U.S. oil assets. Cenovus described its 15-percent budget cut for 2015 as “capital restraint in the year ahead in the face of weaker oil prices.”

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(P)olitical jostling over the murky nuances of oil markets often glosses over some of the escape hatches in the State Department’s price scenario: For the death of the pipeline to slow Canadian oil sands growth – and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions – other major export projects for the Canadian fuel would also have to run into problems, the study said.

That “pipeline-constrained” scenario was taking shape even before this fall’s oil crash, thanks to an obstruction campaign by climate activists and indigenous peoples on both sides of the border. Three other massive pipeline projects that would funnel crude from Canada’s oil-rich Alberta province to its coastlines have met fierce resistance from greens.

The eurozone crisis – history is repeating itself … again

Larry Elliott, The Guardian

Sunday 14 December 2014 06.09 EST

Let’s start with Greece, which was where the eurozone crisis began all those years ago. The French statesman Talleyrand once said of the Bourbons that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The same applies to the bunch of incompetents in Brussels, Berlin and Frankfurt responsible for pushing Greece towards economic and political meltdown.

Greece’s recent economic performance has been pretty good. The economy is growing, unemployment is on the decline and the debt to GDP ratio has come down a bit. Time, you might think, to cut Athens a bit of slack. Not if you are the German government, the European commission or the European Central Bank. No, they are insisting on even more austerity and continued surveillance by the International Monetary Fund.

But the Greeks have had a bellyful of austerity. They have had enough of being pushed around. Predictably, support for the anti-austerity Syriza party is strong and the mood is angry. In an attempt to regain the initiative, the government in Athens brought forward the dates for the votes in parliament to elect a new president. If by the time of the third vote at the end of the December, the centre right’s candidate Stavros Dimas, a former EU commissioner, has not secured 180 votes out of 300 – unlikely as things stand – there will be an election that Syriza could win.

The chances of it doing so will certainly be enhanced unless the Bourbon-in-chief, Jean-Claude Juncker, learns when to keep his mouth shut. By saying he wanted “known faces” rather than “extremist forces” in charge in Greece, the European commission president was the perfect recruiting sergeant for Syriza.

The gamble seems to be that Syriza, assuming that there is an election in which it emerges victorious, will either do a U-turn on austerity voluntarily or be forced to do a U-turn due to hostile market reaction. The collapse of a Syriza government will herald the return of a centre-right government who will do what Juncker and Angela Merkel tell them to do.

But this has not been properly thought through. A crisis in Greece will take months to unfold. Bond yields will rise in every eurozone country seen as vulnerable: Portugal, Spain, Italy and, perhaps, Belgium. Business and consumer confidence will be hit. Concerns about the non-performing loans held by Europe’s shaky banks will be reignited.

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A fresh Greek crisis will have spillover effects. It will lead to a fresh recession and deepen deflation. Weak growth and falling prices are a toxic combination for highly indebted countries, because they raise the real value of debts while cutting national output.

Beppe Grillo of Italy’s Five Star Movement has said. “Eventually will come a time when a politician will hold up a copy of the EMU [European Monetary Union] treaty, declare it null and void, and the debt null and void right along with it. That politician will be elected.”

And the moment that politician will be elected may not be all that far away. The only conceivable way to solve some – if not all – of the design flaws in the euro is for a strategy that involves debt forgiveness, expansionary policies in the countries – such as Germany – that can afford it, a large-scale quantitative easing programme from the European Central Bank and much more aggressive attempts to rid the banks of their toxic assets.

Unfortunately, this is not on the table. Eventually, once the crisis is raging, the ECB may well overcome Germany’s misgivings about buying sovereign bonds and dip its toe in the water with a limited QE programme. It will be too little too late, and in any case contingent on further so-called structural reforms, shorthand for wage cuts and the dilution of labour rights.

Mad as Hellas

Paul Krugman, The New York Times

DEC. 11, 2014

The Greek fiscal crisis erupted five years ago, and its side effects continue to inflict immense damage on Europe and the world. But I’m not talking about the side effects you may have in mind – spillovers from Greece’s Great Depression-level slump, or financial contagion to other debtors. No, the truly disastrous effect of the Greek crisis was the way it distorted economic policy, as supposedly serious people around the world rushed to learn the wrong lessons.

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What happened last time, you may recall, was the exploitation of Greece’s woes to change the economic subject. Suddenly, we were supposed to obsess over budget deficits, even if borrowing costs were at historic lows, and slash government spending, even in the face of mass unemployment. Because if we didn’t, you see, we could turn into Greece any day now. “Greece stands as a warning of what happens to countries that lose their credibility,” intoned David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, as he announced austerity policies in 2010. “We are on the same path as Greece,” declared Representative Paul Ryan, who was soon to become the chairman of the House Budget Committee, that same year.

In reality, Britain and the United States, which borrow in their own currencies, were and are nothing like Greece. If you thought otherwise in 2010, by now year after year of incredibly low interest rates and low inflation should have convinced you.

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(T)he devastation in Greece is awesome to behold. Some press reports I’ve seen seem to suggest that the country has been a malingerer, balking at the harsh measures its situation demands. In reality, it has made huge adjustments – slashing public employment and compensation, cutting back social programs, raising taxes. If you want a sense of the scale of austerity, it would be as if the United States had introduced spending cuts and tax increases amounting to more than $1 trillion a year. Meanwhile, wages in the private sector have plunged. Yet a quarter of the Greek labor force, and half its young, remain unemployed.

Meanwhile, the debt situation has if anything gotten worse, with the ratio of public debt to G.D.P. at a record high – mainly because of falling G.D.P., not rising debt – and with the emergence of a big private debt problem, thanks to deflation and depression. There are some positives; the economy is growing a bit, finally, largely thanks to a revival of tourism. But, over all, it has been many years of suffering for very little reward.

The remarkable thing, given all that, has been the willingness of the Greek public to take it, to accept the claims of the political establishment that the pain is necessary and will eventually lead to recovery. And the news that has roiled Europe these past few days is that the Greeks may have reached their limit. The details are complex, but basically the current government is trying a fairly desperate political maneuver to put off a general election. And, if it fails, the likely winner in that election is Syriza, a party of the left that has demanded a renegotiation of the austerity program, which could lead to a confrontation with Germany and exit from the euro.

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This is what happens when an elite claims the right to rule based on its supposed expertise, its understanding of what must be done – then demonstrates both that it does not, in fact, know what it is doing, and that it is too ideologically rigid to learn from its mistakes.

Repeat after me- Neoliberal Economics Does.  Not.  Work.

James Elmer Mitchell (aka Grayson Swigert) and John Bruce Jessen (aka Hammond Dunbar) are the names of the chief designers of the United States program of torture run by the CIA.

While not responsible for the decision by the United States government to violate its Constitutional and International Treaty obligations (that came directly from the White House, specifically Richard Bruce Cheney aka “Dick” Cheney), they were admittedly responsible for selecting the tortures to be used, oversaw the implementation of those tortures, and actively tortured themselves.

For this they received $81 Million of a $180 Million contract from the United States Government.

These facts are undisputed.

What you may not know that is that James Mitchell was already employed by the CIA’s Office of Technical Services in 2002, from which he was selected to develop the United States Torture Program.  As masters of CIA triva like Valtin remember, this was the same division of the CIA responsible for the MKULTRA program.

MKULTRA was the code name given to an illegal and clandestine program of experiments on human beings, made by the CIA – the Intelligence Service of the United States of America. Experiments on humans were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations and torture, in order to weaken the individual to force confessions through mind control. Organized through the Scientific Intelligence Division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the project coordinated with the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and officially halted in 1973. The program engaged in many illegal activities; In particular it used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy. MKUltra used numerous methodologies to manipulate people’s mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.

SSCI Report Reveals CIA Torture Program Originated in Same Department as MKULTRA

By: Jeff Kaye, Firedog Lake

Thursday December 11, 2014 12:47 am

The sheer brutality of the program’s use of torture is overwhelming, from the use of forced enemas on detainees – the CIA called it “rectal hydration” and “rectal feeding” – to intense use of solitary confinement, threats to kill prisoners’ families, homicide, and more. Revelations from this report will continue to be reported and absorbed into the world’s understanding of the criminal extent of the U.S. torture program for months or years to come.

But one revelation has gone notably unreported. The man associated with implementing the most brutal part of the interrogation program was drawn out of the same division of the CIA that some decades ago had been responsible for the notorious MKULTRA program. As a CIA history of OTS (.PDF) explains, MKULTRA “involved Agency funding for the testing and use of chemical and biological agents and other means of controlling or modifying human behavior” (p. 19)

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On April 1, 2002, a cable was sent from OTS at the request of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and ALEC Station, which was the group within CIA supposedly hunting down Osama bin Ladin, discussing the possible use of “novel interrogation methods” on Abu Zubaydah.

The new proposed interrogation strategy proposed “several environmental modifications to create an atmosphere that enhances the strategic interrogation process.” The cable continued, “[t]he deliberate manipulation of the environment is intended to cause psychological disorientation, and reduced psychological wherewithal for the interrogation,” as well as “the deliberate establishment of psychological dependence upon the interrogator,” and “an increased sense of learned helplessness.”

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(I)t seems more likely, for reasons that will be further explored below, that the program was initiated by OTS itself, and constituted at least in part an experimental program. What exactly the experiment consisted is not totally clear. But it may have involved the use of wireless or other medical devices to measure biological markers of “uncontrollable stress,” in an effort to establish a scientific calibration of torture and overall behavioral or mental control of prisoners. That such a “mind control” effort would originate or be carried out by the same institution that spent millions of dollars on the MKULTRA program is not difficult to believe.

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OTS has been part of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) since the early 1970s. It was transferred from the Directorate of Plans (clandestine operations, renamed around that time, the Directorate of Operations). OTS had earlier gone under other names itself, including Technical Service Staff and Technical Services Division. OTS and its predecessors had been involved in arranging the technical aspect of covert operations, including audio surveillance, forgery, secret writing, spy paraphenalia, sophisticated electronics, and assassination devices.

Then, there was the massive MKULTRA project, which had other names as well, and was coordinated in various ways with similar military programs. MKULTRA had well over a hundred “subprojects,” and contracted with many of the U.S.’s top universities and medical and psychological researchers. (For listing of subprojects see here and here.)

MKULTRA research is probably best known for its use of hallucinogens, like LSD, which were sometimes used on unsuspecting civilians, and resulted in damaged lives and even deaths. Sometimes derided as subject matter for conspiracy theorists, MKULTRA and assorted programs was all-too-real. While the vast majority of its documentation was destroyed by CIA leaders with the program was exposed in the early 1970s, what we do know it terrifying.