Tag: ek Politics

Barack Obama now faces the fact that if the US bombs Syria it will be totally alone and without allies, except maybe France.

The Arab League has condemned Syria but refuses to call for the use of force.

Turkey has backed out after it was reveled the the primary intelligence alleging the Assad government used Chemical Weapons relies on an Israeli communications intercept of a low ranking officer and a Syrian defector who dubiously ‘claims’ inside contacts in the Assad regime.

The UN Security Council will surely reject a authorization to use force and the UN inspection team has withdrawn after inconclusive results.

And now this-

Cameron forced to rule out British attack on Syria after MPs reject motion

Nicholas Watt and Nick Hopkins, Guardian

Thursday 29 August 2013 18.07 EDT

David Cameron indicated on Thursday evening that Britain would not take part in military action against Syria after the government lost a crucial vote on an already watered-down amendment that was designed to pave the way to intervention in the war-torn country.

In a devastating blow to his authority, the prime minister lost a government motion by 272 votes to 285 – an opposition majority of 13 – after scores of Tory MPs voted with Labour.

…

Labour claimed that the government ran into trouble when Nick Clegg struggled, in the closing minutes of the debate, to answer concerns on all sides of the house that the government motion would have taken Britain closer to joining a US military operation against the Assad regime in Syria after last week’s chemical weapons attack.

One MP shouted “resign” as the results were read out by the speaker. David Cameron said the government would respect the decision of parliament which means that Britain will not take part in military strikes against Syria.

Asked by Ed Miliband for an assurance that he would not use the royal prerogative to sanction British involvement in the military action, the prime told MPs: “I can give that assurance. Let me say, the House has not voted for either motion tonight. I strongly believe in the need for a tough response to the use of chemical weapons, but I also believe in respecting the will of this House of Commons.

“It is very clear tonight that, while the House has not passed a motion, it is clear to me that the British parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action.

“I get that and the government will act accordingly.”

…

The shock result means that Cameron becomes the first British prime minister in decades unable to deliver British troops to a joint military operation with the US. Whitehall sources had said Barack Obama was willing to show some patience for Britain but he would need to launch strikes against Syria before he leaves for the G20 summit in Russia next Tuesday. The New York Times reported on Thursday night that Obama is preparing to act alone at the weekend.

Earlier, the prime minister had tried to make a virtue out of conceding that MPs were to be given a second vote on any military action by saying that he had allowed UN time and giving parliament a major say on the crisis.

Cameron moved to build the case for action by releasing a three-page assessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee which said it was “highly likely” the Assad regime launched the chemical weapons attack. But the document failed to ascribe a motive to the regime for the attack.

Downing Street also released a government summary of the legal advice by the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, which said military action would be lawful “under the doctrine of humanitarian intervention”.

So, they got nothing except “trust us, we know what we’re doing.”

Neither has Obama.  If the intent was to restore his credibility after he drew a bright red line, that mission has already failed.

No one in the Mid-East, indeed no one in Europe, views him as anything but Netanyahu’s lap dog and no amount of bombing will fix that.

Obama administration to press case on Syria but support for strikes wavers

Paul Lewis and Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Thursday 29 August 2013 15.53 EDT

The UK released an intelligence assessment on Thursday that said it was “highly likely” that the regime of Bashar al-Assad was responsible for a chemical attack that killed hundreds in a Damascus suburb last week.

However, the document contained few specifics, and failure by the US and UK to say with absolute certainty that the attacks were conducted by the Syrian government have prompted challenging questions in Congress and led to signs of growing anxiety among traditional US allies.

It has also prompted comparisons with Iraq in 2003, when the US launched an invasion on the pretext of weapons of mass destructions that were never found. “As it relates to the situation in Iraq, I don’t agree these are similar situations,” deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Thursday.

…

In a sign of the importance the White House is attaching to support from Capitol Hill, the briefings with “congressional leaders and the chairs and ranking members of national security committees” would be given by the secretary of state John Kerry, and secretary of defence Chuck Hagel.

Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice and director of national intelligence James Clapper will also participate in the briefing.

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France has also called for a delay to any military action until the UN inspectors complete their work.

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, instructed the 20-strong inspection team in Damascus to leave on Saturday, a day before they had expected to leave. Ban also announced the team would report to him immediately on departure.

Military and foreign policy experts were split over whether the US would forge ahead with cruise missile strikes against Syria. Obama, who has long been reluctant to be engaged militarily in the Middle East, is now considering the prospect of taking military action with less international support than George Bush’s 2003 invasion of in Iraq.

However, Earnest, the White House deputy spokesman, seemed to confirm that was a possibility when he was asked whether the US would “go it alone”.

Earnest repeatedly said it was in US “core national security interests” to enforce international chemical weapons norms. “The president of the United States is elected with the duty to protect the national security interests of America,” he said. “The decisions he makes about our foreign policy is with our national security interests front and centre.”

Analysts said that with the Arab League condemning Syria but not backing military action, and no prospect of a UN security council mandate, reluctance on the part of Britain and France could prove a problem for the US.

…

Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst now at the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy, said that with continuing uncertainty over the intelligence picture, and no obvious legal mandate for military action, the US will be desperate to secure more international backing to argue intervention is “legitimate”.

“If the administration can’t even count of the full-throated support of our closest ally, the country that stuck by us even during the worst days of Iraq, that legitimacy is going to be called into question,” he said.

Criminal, or just stupid?

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war “essentially an evil thing…to initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”- Robert H. Jackson

You know, like dialysis and bridges that don’t fall down and paved roads and streetlights.

Little things.

U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives detailed in ‘black budget’ summary

By Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, Washington Post

Updated: Thursday, August 29, 1:02 PM

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses those funds or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.

…

Among the notable revelations in the budget summary:

•Spending by the CIA has surged past that of every other spy agency, with $14.7 billion in requested funding for 2013. The figure vastly exceeds outside estimates and is nearly 50 percent above that of the National Security Agency, which conducts eavesdropping operations and has long been considered the behemoth of the community.

•The CIA and NSA have launched aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.”

•The NSA planned to investigate at least 4,000 possible insider threats in 2013, cases in which the agency suspected sensitive information may have been compromised by one of its own. The budget documents show that the U.S. intelligence community worried long before Snowden’s leaks about “anomalous behavior” by personnel with access to highly classified material.

•U.S. intelligence officials take an active interest in foes as well as friends. Pakistan is described in detail as an “intractable target,” and counterintelligence operations “are strategically focused against [the] priority targets of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Israel.”

•In words, deeds and dollars, intelligence agencies remain fixed on terrorism as the gravest threat to national security, which is listed first among five “mission objectives.” Counterterrorism programs employ one in four members of the intelligence workforce and account for one-third of all spending.

•The governments of Iran, China and Russia are difficult to penetrate, but North Korea’s may be the most opaque. There are five “critical” gaps in U.S. intelligence about Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs, and analysts know virtually nothing about the intentions of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

…

In an introduction, (Director of National Intelligence James R.) Clapper said the threats now facing the United States “virtually defy rank-ordering.” He warned of “hard choices” as the intelligence community – sometimes referred to as the “IC” – seeks to rein in spending after a decade of often double-digit budget increases.

This year’s budget proposal envisions that spending will remain roughly level through 2017 and amounts to a case against substantial cuts.

…

The summary provides a detailed look at how the U.S. intelligence community has been reconfigured by the massive infusion of resources that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on intelligence during that period, an outlay that U.S. officials say has succeeded in its main objective: preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States.

The result is an espionage empire with resources and reach beyond those of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds the levels reached at the height of the Cold War.

…

Historical data on U.S. intelligence spending is largely nonexistent. Through extrapolation, experts have estimated that Cold War spending likely peaked in the late 1980s at an amount that would be the equivalent of $71 billion today.

Spending in the most recent cycle surpassed that amount based on the $52.6 billion detailed in documents obtained by The Post, plus a separate $23 billion devoted to intelligence programs that more directly support the U.S. military.

…

Despite the vast outlays, the budget blueprint catalogs persistent and in some cases critical blind spots.

Throughout the document, U.S. spy agencies attempt to rate their efforts in tables akin to report cards, generally citing progress but often acknowledging that only a fraction of their questions could be answered – even on the community’s foremost priority, counter-terrorism.

In 2011, the budget assessment says intelligence agencies made at least “moderate progress” on 38 of their 50 top counterterrorism gaps, the term used to describe blind spots. Several concern Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, an enemy of Israel that has not attacked U.S. interests directly since the 1990s.

Other blank spots include questions about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear components when they are being transported, the capabilities of China’s next generation fighter aircraft, and how Russia’s government leaders are likely to respond “to potentially destabilizing events in Moscow, such as large protests and terrorist attacks.”

A chart outlining efforts to address key questions on biological and chemical weapons is particularly bleak. U.S. agencies set themselves annual goals of making progress in at least five categories of intelligence collection related to these weapons. In 2011, the agencies made headway on just two gaps; a year earlier the mark was zero.

The documents describe expanded efforts to “collect on Russian chemical warfare countermeasures” and assess the security of biological and chemical laboratories in Pakistan.

A table of “critical” gaps listed five for North Korea, more than for any other country that has or is pursuing a nuclear bomb.

The intelligence community seems particularly daunted by the emergence of “home grown” terrorists who plan attacks in the United States without direct support or instruction from abroad, a threat realized this year, after the budget was submitted, in twin bombings at the Boston Marathon.

The National Counterterrorism Center has convened dozens of analysts from other agencies in attempts to identify “indicators” that could help law enforcement understand the path from religious extremism to violence. The FBI was in line for funding to increase the number of agents surreptitiously tracking activity on jihadist Web sites.

But a year before the bombings in Boston the search for meaningful insight into the stages of radicalization was described as one of “the more challenging intelligence gaps.”

That’s right, Ed Snowden.  Who’s the traitor now?

These cases don’t have much in common, but they do illustrate the arrogance of our Moron Masters of the Universe.

JPMorgan Bribe Probe Said to Expand in Asia as Spreadsheet Is Found

By Dawn Kopecki, Bloomberg News

Aug 28, 2013 11:51 PM ET

A probe of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s (JPM) hiring practices in China has uncovered red flags across Asia, including an internal spreadsheet that linked appointments to specific deals pursued by the bank, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The Justice Department has joined the Securities and Exchange Commission in examining whether JPMorgan hired people so that their family members in government and elsewhere would steer business to the firm, possibly violating bribery laws, said one of the people, all of whom asked to not be named because the inquiry isn’t public. The bank has opened an internal investigation that has flagged more than 200 hires for review, said two people with knowledge of the examination, results of which JPMorgan is sharing with regulators.

…

The spreadsheet, which links some hiring decisions to specific transactions pursued by the bank, may be viewed by regulators as evidence that JPMorgan added people in exchange for business, according to one person with knowledge of the review.

Merrill Lynch in Big Payout for Bias Case

By PATRICK MCGEEHAN, The New York Times

August 27, 2013, 9:02 pm

Merrill Lynch, one of the biggest brokerage firms on Wall Street, has agreed to pay $160 million to settle a racial bias lawsuit that wound through the federal courts for eight years, including two appeals to the United States Supreme Court.

The payout in the suit, which was filed on behalf of 700 black brokers who worked for Merrill, would be the largest sum ever distributed to plaintiffs in a racial discrimination suit against an American employer.

…

Among the many twists in the case was the admission in a deposition by Merrill’s first black chief executive, E. Stanley O’Neal, that black brokers might have a harder time because most of the firm’s prospective clients were white and might not trust their wealth to brokers who were not.

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Class actions are the only way around the custom on Wall Street of making all employees agree to resolve any disputes through arbitration. But to persuade a court to certify a class, the plaintiffs must prove that a sufficient number of workers are in a similar situation.

Mr. McReynolds and his lawyers gradually persuaded more brokers to sign on as representatives of the class. Early on, as the accusations in the case drew attention from the news media, Merrill executives rushed to hire more blacks into the firm’s training program and met with the plaintiffs to try to reach a settlement.

…

Three years ago, a judge in Chicago denied their motion to be certified as a class. They appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, but were denied. That could have been the end of the road, especially after the United States Supreme Court ruled in 2011 against female employees of Wal-Mart who tried to sue the retailer for sex-discrimination as a large class.

…

Even though the Wal-Mart decision was considered a serious setback for class actions like the McReynolds case, Ms. Friedman went back to the Seventh Circuit last year.

…

In a decision that surprised many observers, an appellate panel accepted that argument and reversed the lower court’s denial of class certification. Merrill appealed that decision to the Supreme Court but was denied a hearing. A trial date was set for January 2014, but Merrill decided to settle rather than drag the fight on any longer.

Goldman Sachs’ Jason Lee Indicted on Rape Charge

By Chris Dolmetsch, Bloomberg News

Aug 28, 2013 6:07 PM ET

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) managing director Jason Lee was indicted by a grand jury on a rape charge stemming from the alleged assault on a 20-year-old woman at a Long Island, New York, home, court records show.

Lee, 37, was arrested and charged with first-degree rape on Aug. 21 in the town of East Hampton after police went to his Clover Leaf Lane vacation home and learned that a woman had been sexually assaulted inside the residence, where several people had gathered, according to a police statement.

…

The alleged assault occurred at a home of the defendant, police said. A description of a 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom 2,700-square-foot house on the street where Lee was arrested, posted on the website of Douglas Elliman Real Estate, said it was available from Aug. 1 until Labor Day for $33,000.

U.S. Bank Legal Bills Exceed $100 Billion

By Donal Griffin & Dakin Campbell, Bloomberg News

Aug 28, 2013 12:02 PM ET

That’s the amount allotted to lawyers and litigation, as well as for settling claims about shoddy mortgages and foreclosures, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The sum, equivalent to spending $51 million a day, is enough to erase everything the banks earned for 2012.

…

Legal fees and litigation costs accounted for $56 billion of Bloomberg’s $103 billion tally, with $7.2 billion incurred just for the first six months of this year. The rest, $47 billion, was for payments to mortgage investors.

Bank of America, led by Chief Executive Officer Brian T. Moynihan, 53, increased its legal costs by $3.3 billion in the first half to a total of $19.1 billion. JPMorgan added $1.5 billion in the period. The other four lenders added about $2.4 billion combined in the six months.

Jamie Dimon, 57, JPMorgan’s CEO, is contending with criminal probes into his New York-based bank’s energy-trading and mortgage-backed securities operations while grappling with investigations into anti-money-laundering safeguards, foreclosures, credit-card collections, and the $6.2 billion London Whale trading loss last year.

A U.S. housing regulator is seeking at least $6 billion to settle claims JPMorgan sold bad mortgage bonds to government-backed finance companies Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac, a person briefed on the matter said this week. The bank is fighting the request, the person said.

Penalties in the London Whale episode, named for a U.K. trader whose big bets moved markets, may reach $600 million, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. Regulators also are preparing enforcement actions against JPMorgan for its treatment of consumers during the recession that could result in fines of about $80 million, the New York Times reported, citing people briefed on the matter.

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The totals would be billions of dollars higher if U.S. cases involving the biggest European banks were counted. HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe’s largest lender, agreed last year to pay $1.92 billion to settle U.S. money-laundering probes. UBS AG, the largest lender in Switzerland, said in July it would pay $885 million to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (FMCC) on claims that it improperly sold them mortgage-backed securities.

Barclays Plc, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc were fined a combined $2.5 billion to settle allegations by regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere that that they helped rig the benchmark London interbank offered rate.

…

Citigroup, the third-biggest U.S. bank, added $1.4 billion in legal expenses so far this year, almost double its costs for the first half of 2012. The New York-based lender is facing “legacy issues” tied to mortgage products, Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach said last month.

The bank also boosted its estimate for possible future legal losses not covered by reserves to $5 billion as of June from $4 billion a year earlier. JPMorgan raised the upper end of its estimate to $6.8 billion from $5.3 billion. Bank of America reduced its figure to $2.8 billion from $4.1 billion after settling some of its biggest pending cases.

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The top four banks added $1.4 billion to their reserves in the first half to cover repurchases of bad home loans, filings show. These cases typically involve demands for refunds from investors who bought mortgages or mortgage-backed securities and later uncovered flaws in the paperwork, such as incorrect data about the borrowers and properties. Banks typically sell the mortgages with a promise to buy them back if such defects arise.

Bank of America has set aside $28.6 billion for repurchases since 2008, more than half of the total for the four lenders, according to filings. When added to legal costs, the firm’s combined tally is about $48 billion.

Those reserves probably aren’t enough to cover more recent cases, according to Peabody, the Portales analyst. Bank of America is facing a multibillion-dollar settlement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency tied to mortgage-backed securities, he wrote in an Aug. 6 note that recommended “aggressively” selling Bank of America shares.

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“It’s likely the financial institutions don’t yet know of some of these lawsuits,” said Walter J. Mix III, head of financial-institutions consulting at Berkeley Research Group LLC and a former commissioner of the California Department of Financial Institutions. “The litigation can go on for 10 years or more.”

Private Gain to a Few Trumps Public Good for the Many

Robert Reich

Thursday, August 22, 2013

A society – any society — is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.

Public institutions are supported by all taxpayers, and are available to all. If the tax system is progressive, those who are better off (and who, presumably, have benefitted from many of these same public institutions) help pay for everyone else.

“Privatize” means “Pay for it yourself.” The practical consequence of this in an economy whose wealth and income are now more concentrated than at any time in the past 90 years is to make high-quality public goods available to fewer and fewer.

In fact, much of what’s called “public” is increasingly a private good paid for by users – ever-higher tolls on public highways and public bridges, higher tuitions at so-called public universities, higher admission fees at public parks and public museums.

Much of the rest of what’s considered “public” has become so shoddy that those who can afford to do so find private alternatives. As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better-off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, the well-off pay premium rates for private care.

…

The great expansion of public institutions in America began in the early years of 20th century, when progressive reformers championed the idea that we all benefit from public goods. Excellent schools, roads, parks, playgrounds and transit systems would knit the new industrial society together, create better citizens and generate widespread prosperity.

Education, for example, was less a personal investment than a public good – improving the entire community and ultimately the nation.

In subsequent decades – through the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War – this logic was expanded upon. Strong public institutions were seen as bulwarks against, in turn, mass poverty, fascism and then Soviet communism.

The public good was palpable: We were very much a society bound together by mutual needs and common threats. It was no coincidence that the greatest extensions of higher education after World War II were the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act, or that the largest public works project in history was called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act.

But in a post-Cold War America distended by global capital, distorted by concentrated income and wealth, undermined by unlimited campaign donations, and rocked by a wave of new immigrants easily cast by demagogues as “them,” the notion of the public good has faded.

Not even Democrats still use the phrase “the public good.” Public goods are now, at best, “public investments.” Public institutions have morphed into “public-private partnerships” or, for Republicans, simply “vouchers.”

…

America has, though, created a whopping entitlement for the biggest Wall Street banks and their top executives – who, unlike most of the rest of us, are no longer allowed to fail. They can also borrow from the Fed at almost no cost, then lend out the money at 3 percent to 6 percent.

All told, Wall Street’s entitlement is the biggest offered by the federal government, even though it doesn’t show up in the budget. And it’s not even a public good. It’s just private gain.

We’re losing public goods available to all, supported by the tax payments of all and especially the better-off. In its place we have private goods available to the very rich, supported by the rest of us.

Yup, not too hard to figure out what this is all about-

Advocate of Secret Infiltration, Cass Sunstein, on Obama’s "Committee To Make Us Trust the Dragnet"

by emptywheel

August 22, 2013

ABC reports that, along with former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell, former Homeland Security Czar Richard Clarke, and former Obama special assistant for economic policy Peter Swire, the White House (or James Clapper – who knows at this point) has picked Cass Sunstein for its Review Committee on NSA programs.

Frankly, a lot of people are investing misplaced confidence that Richard Clarke will make this committee useful. While he’s good on a lot of issues, he’s as hawkish on cybersecurity as anyone else in this country. And as I keep pointing out, these programs are really about cybersecurity. Richard Clarke is not going to do a damned thing to rein in a program that increasingly serves to surveil US Internet data to protect against cyberthreats.

But Sunstein? Really?

As Glenn Greenwald (yeah – that Glenn; did they really think no one would raise this point?) reported back in 2010, Sunstein wrote a paper in 2008 advocating very creepy stealth measures against “conspiracy theories.”

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And remember, a big mandate for this committee is not to review the programs to see if we can make them more privacy-protective, but simply to increase our trust in them. Which goes to the core of what Sunstein was talking about in his paper: using covert government propaganda to, in this case, better sell covert government spying.

Well, if Obama and Clapper’s rollout hadn’t already discredited this committee, Sunstein’s selection sure does.

Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal

Glenn Greenwald, Salon

Friday, Jan 15, 2010 1:16 PM UTC

Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.”  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”  Sunstein’s 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story’s Daniel Tencer.

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Initially, note how similar Sunstein’s proposal is to multiple, controversial stealth efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape our political debates.  The Bush Pentagon employed teams of former Generals to pose as “independent analysts” in the media while secretly coordinating their talking points and messaging about wars and detention policies with the Pentagon.  Bush officials secretly paid supposedly “independent” voices, such as Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, to advocate pro-Bush policies while failing to disclose their contracts.  In Iraq, the Bush Pentagon hired a company, Lincoln Park, which paid newspapers to plant pro-U.S. articles while pretending it came from Iraqi citizens.  In response to all of this, Democrats typically accused the Bush administration of engaging in government-sponsored propaganda – and when it was done domestically, suggested this was illegal propaganda.  Indeed, there is a very strong case to make that what Sunstein is advocating is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government “propaganda” within the U.S., aimed at American citizens.

A provision just eliminated, how convenient.  To continue-

Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves.  His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise.  Indeed, he favorably cites both the covert Lincoln Park program as well as Paul Bremer’s closing of Iraqi newspapers which published stories the U.S. Government disliked, and justifies them as arguably necessary to combat “false conspiracy theories” in Iraq – the same goal Sunstein has for the U.S.

Sunstein’s response to these criticisms is easy to find in what he writes, and is as telling as the proposal itself.  He acknowledges that some “conspiracy theories” previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true (his examples:  the CIA really did secretly administer LSD in “mind control” experiments; the DOD really did plot the commission of terrorist acts inside the U.S. with the intent to blame Castro; the Nixon White House really did bug the DNC headquarters).  Given that history, how could it possibly be justified for the U.S. Government to institute covert programs designed to undermine anti-government “conspiracy theories,” discredit government critics, and increase faith and trust in government pronouncements?  Because, says Sunstein, such powers are warranted only when wielded by truly well-intentioned government officials who want to spread The Truth and Do Good – i.e., when used by people like Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama.

…

Consider the recent revelation that the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President’s health care plan.  With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama’s health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House – falsely – as an “independent” or “objective” authority.  Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber’s analysis to support their defenses of the President’s plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed.  This created an infinite "feedback loop" in favor of Obama’s health care plan which – unbeknownst to the public – was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).

In other words, this arrangement was quite similar to the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals which Democrats, in virtual lockstep, condemned.  Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case.  Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.”  What is one key difference?  Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views – he favors health care – and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”

…

What is most odious and revealing about Sunstein’s worldview is his condescending, self-loving belief that “false conspiracy theories” are largely the province of fringe, ignorant Internet masses and the Muslim world.  That, he claims, is where these conspiracy theories thrive most vibrantly, and he focuses on various 9/11 theories – both domestically and in Muslim countries – as his prime example.

It’s certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive “false conspiracy theories” have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power:  namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, “crazy conspiracy theorist” has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption.

Who is it who relentlessly spread “false conspiracy theories” of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba’athist/Al-Qaeda alliance – the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation?  And who is it who demonized as “conspiracy-mongers” people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government?  The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of “conspiracy theory” games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources:  namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.

It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein’s desire to use covert propaganda to “undermine” anti-government speech so repugnant.  The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned – rationally – to distrust government actions and statements.  Sunstein’s proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is.  In other words, people don’t trust the Government and “conspiracy theories” are so pervasive precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.

Remember-

a big mandate for this committee is not to review the programs to see if we can make them more privacy-protective, but simply to increase our trust in them

Most.  Transparent.  Administration.  Ever.

This is what happens in the criminal justice culture of testalying.

Chemist in lab scandal told investigators: ‘I messed up bad’

By Brian Ballou and Andrea Estes, Boston Globe

9/26/12

The former state chemist at the heart of the state drug lab scandal admitted to investigators that she improperly removed evidence from storage, forged colleagues’ signatures, and didn’t perform proper tests on drugs for “two or three years,” according to a copy of a State Police report obtained by the Globe.

Annie Dookhan, whose misconduct may have jeopardized evidence in about 34,000 drug cases, also admitted that she recorded drug tests as positive when they were negative “a few times” and sometimes tested only a small sample of the drug batch that she was supposed to analyze.

…

However, the troopers’ interviews with other chemists in the lab make clear that Dookhan’s colleagues had concerns about her unusually large caseload and lab habits and raised them with supervisors. But the supervisors took little action even when they learned that she had forged other chemists’ initials on some drug samples.

…

The state lab in Jamaica Plain was closed in August after State Police discovered the potential magnitude of Dookhan’s actions. As a state chemist for nine years, Dookhan handled 60,000 drug samples and sometimes provided expert testimony in court.

Annie Dookhan, alleged rogue state chemist, may have affected 40,323 people’s cases, review finds

By David Abel, John R. Ellement and Martin Finucane, Boston Globe

8/20/13

Governor Deval Patrick’s administration said today it believes that the criminal cases of 40,323 people may have been tainted by the actions of alleged rogue drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan and the management failures at the now-closed Department of Public Health lab where she worked.

…

But to the Committee for Public Counsel Services and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the administration’s final tally does not fully capture the damage done to individual defendants. The Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state’s public defender agency, believes all 190,000 cases sent through the Department of Public Health lab dating back to the early 1990s are now suspect and should be dismissed.

“The whole thing is disturbing,” Anthony Benedetti, chief counsel for the committee said of Meier’s findings and the drug lab scandal. “I think every one of the 40,000 cases she touched should be thrown out. Whether it was possession (of illegal drugs) or distribution (of illegal drugs), the conviction is tainted because of the conduct of Annie Dookhan.”

Matthew Segal, legal director of the ACLU Massachusetts, said the state’s criminal justice system must do more to help those whose civil rights may have been violated by Dookhan’s alleged mishandling of evidence, and the failure of her superiors to stop it.

“David Meier’s announcement today confirms that we are no closer to solving this problem,” said Segal. “There are 40,000 people whose convictions have been potentially tainted and the vast majority of them haven’t had a day in court. Merely identifying them isn’t justice.”

…

In addition to unraveling hundreds of drug convictions, the scandal has also cost the state millions of dollars to pay individual prosecutors’ offices, multiple state agencies, and the judiciary searching for ways to ensure no one was wrongly convicted.

…

For fiscal 2013, lawmakers set aside $30 million for Dookhan-related costs, and the administration set up a procedure that required other government agencies to apply for funding to the state Administration and Finance Agency.

Today, the administration said it has approved $10.4 million in requests, of which only $7.6 million has so far been spent by the agencies involved.

But they were guilty you say.

Really?  How do you know?

I don’t generally work without the buttress of other people’s research and observations because, as a pseudonymous author on the Internet, you have no more reason to trust my opinion than your own.

Less in fact.

As I look out on the developments of this summer I have a few observations and predictions that I’ll just share, naked, my bias should already be apparent in the things I’ve chosen to bring to your attention.

That’s called Editorial decision making.

The National Security State is just as pervasive as the worst imaginations of the most tin foil wearing conspiracy theorist.  My only surprise is that after 7 years of personal advocacy and stony indifference it has suddenly captured the public’s attention.  I believe Glenn Greenwald when he says this is the tip of the iceberg and I hope Ed Snowden stole enough secrets to keep him safe.

Nobody likes to be spied on.  We all have a private movie of the shameful things we have done, or did not do, that we wish to keep from the world.  “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”, is a crock and the hypocrites who parrot it deserve full exposure.  This will only happen if we maintain the pressure, if they didn’t know it was wrong they wouldn’t be scrambling like roaches to avoid the light.

Barack Obama is not as popular among African Americans as you think.  The erosion of his polling has as much to do with the decline of his favorables in that demographic from 98% to 70% as anything else.  The only group where his ratings have increased?  White college+ males making more than $70,000 annually.

Guess they know which side of the bread substitute the icky wax is on.  Obama has performed shamefully for the economic interests of the 99%.  Expect big battles over the budget and debt ceiling with Obama pushing his “Grand Bargain” of chained CPI earned benefit cuts at every opportunity.  Pray for the Tea Party to refuse to provide him a scant fig leaf of revenue.

I’d like to be optimistic about the environment.  It’s a good thing we’ve been able to keep the Alberta Tar Sands bottled up so far, but the sad fact of the matter is we have 50x the amount of carbon we need to produce a global extinction, Epoch changing, methane hydrate explosion in already proven reserves.

If we pump what we already got, we’re all dead.

There is absolutely no indication that any of the Very Serious People are taking that seriously at all, even though Solar and Wind technology are economically competitive with carbon fuels (one of the reasons Alberta might go bust economically and why they are so frantic), much less Nuclear which is just about the most expensive power there is.

I could go on, but I’ll save it.  I’m actually a cheerful guy and I’d hate for you to think I don’t have a plan to improve things when actually, I do.

Rebel.  Rebel in the small things.  Don’t watch the Idiots on TV, say mean things about them (they are notoriously thin skinned, vanity driven, narcissists).  Don’t give Politicians your time or money, you need them more than they do (unless they are worthy), bad mouth them vocally when they deserve it which is most of the time.  They are not your friend, they are your servant.  Punish bad corporations by refusing to patronize them, again they care about your money, not you.

These are but a few ephemeral examples, I’m sure you can think of more and better.  Above all stay informed and active.  No one can take your freedom away, you have to let them.