Disinformation Campaign Proves Effective as Anti-SOPA Strike-Breaker

Two or three days ago, announcements were broadcast on various Media Outlets stating that two bills in the Congress and the Senate, SOPA and PROTECT-IP were effectively “Dead-in-the-Water,” resulting in the cancellation (or extreme reduction) of what would have been an extremely disruptive– and therefore highly dramatic– strike/protest by Major Internet Companies against the proposed legislation.

The fact that no sources were actually named, as well as the coordinated nature of this spurious disinformation campaign, indicates that this legislation, involving a precipitous curtailment of the Civil Liberties in the United States, indicates a scope of political interests far beyond those of the Entertainment Industry.

History shows us that a curtailment of Civil Liberties is never instituted without an eye to a further attack on those same liberties at a later date.

This debate is not over. Expect to hear opponents to these bills caricatured as disgruntled pirates of popular entertainment, 20-somethings living in their mothers’ basements, who want to continue downloading music and movies without having to pay for the privilege.

Expect to read further, and ever more disturbing, developments in the coming months.

View A Legal Analysis of S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act [PDF] from the Congressional Research Service

Wall Street Declares War on America (Yes, this constitutes Conspiracy!)

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan Admits Cities Coordinated Crackdown on Occupy Movement

Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC (excerpted on The Takeaway radio program–audio of Quan starts at the 5:30 mark), casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . .”

Mayor Quan then rambles about how she “spoke with protestors in my city” who professed an interest in “separating from anarchists,” implying that her police action was helping this somehow.

Interestingly, Quan then essentially advocates that occupiers move to private spaces, and specifically cites Zuccotti Park as an example:

In New York City, it’s interesting that the Wall Street movement is actually on a private park, so they’re not, again, in the public domain, and they’re not infringing on the public’s right to use a public park.

Many witnesses to the wave of government crackdowns on numerous #occupy encampments have been wondering aloud if the rapid succession was more than a coincidence; Jean Quan’s casual remark seems to clearly imply that it was.

Might it also be more than a coincidence that this succession of police raids started after President Obama left the US for an extended tour of the Pacific Rim?

Occupy Oakland

Apparently, Wall Street doesn’t believe in the First Amendment right to Freedom of Association:

In a side note: apparently the police tried to claim that it was protesters throwing tear gas grenades. They’re not even good liars.

Also, my nephew went there to observe the event. Good thing he went at the wrong time.

Information flow can reveal malicious intent

Analysis of Enron e-mails reveals structure of corrupt networks

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Political thrillers that portray a “web of corruption” get it all wrong, at least according to an analysis of e-mails between Enron employees. The flow of the famously corrupt corporation’s electronic missives suggests that dirty dealings tend to transpire through a sparse, hub-and-spoke network rather than a highly connected web.

Employees who were engaged in both legitimate and shady projects at the company conveyed information much differently when their dealings were illicit, organizational theorist Brandy Aven of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh reported June 1 at an MIT workshop on social networks. The distinction is visible in the network of e-mails among employees, which takes the shape of a central hub and isolated spokes when content is corrupt, rather than a highly connected net of exchanges.

While today Enron is associated with corporate fraud, for years the energy and commodities company was a Wall Street darling. Fortune magazine named Enron America’s most innovative company for six consecutive years ending in 2000. But by the next year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating the firm’s dealings.

“They were not only innovative technologically and administratively, but also in their accounting practices,” said Aven.

Aven’s analysis compared communications regarding three legitimate innovative projects and three corrupt ones that went by the names JEDI, Chewco and Talon. Communications regarding the shady deals took on a hub-and-spoke shape, a setup that maximizes secrecy and control. A small, relatively informed clique occupies the hub at the center, communicating with protruding spokes that don’t share ties with each other. The hub gets information from the spokes, which in their isolation are less likely to whistle-blow and can be played off each other.

Recognizing that content alters flow is crucial, said Ramakrishna Akella, an expert in information management from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Much of network modeling relies on statistics and algorithms that too often ignore content, he said. “Mining content is very insightful,” said Akella. The sudden appearance of new words or acronyms, for example, can signal the emergence of innovations.

That the sneaky behavior employed to cover the corrupt “innovations” at Enron might have been revealed just by diagramming who is e-mailing whom suggests that the structures of social networks might be a good diagnostic tool. Probing the shapes of social networks might help investigators identify electronic dens of intrigue, such as people communicating within a terrorist network, said Aven.

And the work suggests that networks aren’t just static conduits for information.

“It’s intriguing,” said Aven. “We’ve treated social networks as contained plumbing systems directing the flow of information, but we should think about them as water that carves river beds of social relations.”

Aven’s analysis revealed that, on average, employees sent roughly five e-mails about legitimate projects for every one about those that were corrupt. Transitivity — the tendency of two people who know the same person to also know each other — also dropped markedly in the network of corrupt communications. And reciprocity — back-and-forth rather than one-way communication — plummeted.

Read full story at Science News

How corporations dodge taxes

(CBS News)
Our government is in knots over ways to lower the federal budget deficit. Well, what if we told you we found a pot of money – over $60 billion a year [another report claims U.S. companies are holding $1.2 trillion overseas] – that could be used to help out?

That bundle is tax money not coming in to the IRS from American corporations. One major way they avoid paying the tax man is by parking their profits overseas. They’ll tell you they’re forced to do that because the corporate 35 percent tax rate is high in relation to other countries, and indeed it seems the tax code actually encourages companies to move their businesses out of the country.

Companies searching out tax havens is nothing new: in the 80s and 90s there was an exodus to Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, where there are no taxes at all.

When President Obama threatened to clamp down on tax dodging, many companies decided to leave the Caribbean. But instead of coming back home, they went to safer havens like Switzerland.

Several of these companies came to a small, quaint medieval town in Switzerland call Zug.

The population of the town of Zug is 26,000; the number of companies in the area is 30,000 and growing at an average rate of 800 a year. But many are no more than mailboxes.

Texas Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett questions whether the recent moves of several companies are legit. “A good example is one of my Texas companies that’s been in the news lately, Transocean,” Rep. Doggett told [Leslie] Stahl.

Transocean owned the drilling rig involved in the giant BP oil spill. They moved to Zug two years ago.

“I’m not sure they even moved that much. They have about 1,300 employees still in the Houston area. They have 12 or 13 in Switzerland,” Doggett told Stahl.

“And yet they claim that they’re headquartered over there,” Stahl remarked.

“They claim they’re Swiss. And they claim they’re Swiss for tax purposes. And by doing that, by renouncing their American citizenship, they’ve saved about $2 billion in taxes,” Doggett explained.

Stahl and “60 Minutes” decided to visit their operations in Zug.

A woman at the door told Stahl, “At the moment my boss is not here.”

She said her boss wasn’t there and we should call someone halfway around the world, in Houston.

“But this is the headquarters,” Stahl remarked.

“I know,” the woman said.

When asked if the CEO was there or is normally at the Zug office, the woman said “No.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7360932n

Happy Birthday, Rupert Murdoch!

by Eric Alterman

Take a step back from contemporary American political debate and it’s not hard to conclude that our political class has gone insane. Tax giveaways to the wealthiest Americans as the deficit rages out of control. Attacks on underpaid and overworked teachers, caregivers and firefighters as alleged fat cats. Insults flung at scientists seeking to save us from the consequences of global warming as House committees vote to strip the EPA of its regulatory power. One could go on indefinitely, of course, but searching for a perfect symbol of how and why our priorities have grown so indefensibly askew, one need look no further than a recent issue of The Hollywood Reporter, which featured eighteen tributes from assorted business and entertainment luminaries to media mogul Rupert Murdoch on his eightieth birthday.

None of the tributes come from people identified as conservatives. Quite a few, including Ted Turner, Peter Chernin and Gary Ginsberg, are well-known liberals…
Leave aside the purely corrupt aspects of his business practices: the nepotism; the bribery in the form of millions offered to Newt Gingrich and the daughters of Chinese dictators in the form of “advances” for books that nobody wants to buy; the unionbusting; the cancellation of a book contract by Christopher Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, because it displeased the same Chinese strongmen to whom he kowtowed by kicking the BBC off his satellite network. Judge him instead according to the testimony of film producer Arnon Milchan, who says Murdoch told him, “I am first and foremost a journalist. All the rest is a defense mechanism.”

How to pick the highlights of this esteemed journalistic career? What about the practice at Fox News of deliberately misleading its audience with phony footage—for instance, using films of violent altercations in Florida while pretending to report on peaceful demonstrations in Wisconsin; or, presumably for variety’s sake, using footage of a much larger demonstration somewhere else to give a boost to a poorly attended Michele Bachmann–led rally against healthcare reform? And what are we to make of the anti-Obama rally led by Glenn Beck at which a Fox producer could be seen leading the protesters in cheers as Fox readied to film them?

Of course, this is rather small potatoes compared with the hosts and guests who frequently promote the false and destructive notion that Barack Obama is a Kenya-born Muslim who hates all white people—including, presumably, his mother. (Murdoch, one must recall, said he agreed with Beck’s comments that Obama hates white people.)
As if that’s not dangerous enough, there is the recent campaign of anti-Semitic slander against Holocaust survivor George Soros on Beck’s show and the ginning up of anti-Arab racism on all Fox programming. It’s impossible to know what, exactly, motivates any act of violence by a disturbed person—say, in the case of the attack on Gabrielle Giffords and those around her by a crazed gunman. But what of Beck fan Byron Williams’s desire to take out the progressive Tides Foundation, a frequent Beck target—a crime foiled only when California Highway Patrol officers pulled Williams over on a DUI charge?

It’s no accident that such tactics are so prevalent at Fox; they are the rule rather than the exception at Murdoch properties. Was it really such a shock, for instance, when it was recently reported that Murdoch’s top honcho, Roger Ailes, allegedly instructed ex-HarperCollins employee Judith Regan to lie to federal investigators in order to protect Rudy Giuliani? As mayor, Giuliani had pressured Time Warner Cable after it initially declined to include Fox News on its menu of channels. And is it really so amazing that the British staff of Murdoch’s News of the World were widely engaged in criminal wiretapping to try to scoop their competition? When you consider all this, you almost want to give ex–New York Post gossip columnist Richard Johnson a Pulitzer Prize. All he did was regularly accept cash bribes in exchange for using his column to promote the properties of those handing over the cash. (Johnson was not publicly disciplined when this corruption was revealed.)

If Murdoch is judged as “first and foremost a journalist,” the inevitable conclusion is that he is an enabler and purveyor of lies, hatred and criminal activity in the service of his ideological, financial and personal interests. A man like this deserves to be shunned, à la Bernie Madoff or Mel Gibson. That he is celebrated as some sort of hero by people who need not worry about their reputations tells you almost all you need to know about the insanity that grips our benighted political culture.

More at The Nation

US Uncut’s Tax-Dodging Protests Go Global

by Allison Kilkenny

The founder of US Uncut is ready to take the movement to the next level. Carl Gibson tells me he wants to help shape a simple piece of legislation to end overseas tax havens. Of course, his would not be the first attempt made at such an endeavor. In 2008, Carl Levin [1] crafted the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, legislation then-Senator Obama threw his support behind, and which has, like most bills that make sense, been floating in purgatory ever since.

Reportedly, Senator Levin’s chief investigator, Bob Roach, will present updates on the status of STHA during a session called “US Congressional Offshore Initiatives” at the 9th Annual OffshoreAlert Conference [2] in—why not?—South Beach, Florida April 4-6.

But in the meantime, Gibson, working in concert with the Roosevelt Institute’s Cornell chapter, is drafting a streamlined version of an anti–tax haven bill focusing on a clear message. “Mainly, that we’re losing out on upwards of $100 billion every year in lost revenue because of corporate tax dodging and overseas tax havens,” he says.

He hopes to have the bill ready by Tax Day [April 18 this year]. “This will be legislation that makes it illegal for corporations to move income earned within the United States offshore through corporate tax loopholes, so it would close loopholes and it would also force these companies who already have billions overseas to bring that money back to the United States and pay taxes on it.”

More at The Nation

No Shit: Powell says Iraq invasion was avoidable

By Kazuhiko Kusano, Washington Correspondent / Mainichi Daily News

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has told the Mainichi he believes the Iraq War — which began while he was in office in 2003 — could have been averted.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he described as one that could contain anthrax, during his presentation on Iraq to the U.N. Security Council, in New York on February 5, 2003.

Powell also stated during an Aug. 24 telephone interview that he regretted the false intelligence that led the United States to claim the Saddam Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which Powell presented to the United Nations and which underpinned the U.S. case to invade Iraq.

“I will always be seen as the one who made the major public presentation of that intelligence. I regret that it was wrong but, at the same time, we had every reason to believe it was correct,” Powell said of the false WMD evidence.

In a 2005 interview on ABC television, Powell called the speech a “blot” on his reputation, though he also emphasized that he did not fabricate the intelligence — a point he was keen to reiterate to the Mainichi.

“It was the intelligence that was wrong. I did not make up this information; I did not invent it; I did not pull it out of the air. It was information that our intelligence community stood behind,” he stated.

In November 2002, the U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution demanding Iraq submit to WMD inspections. Powell made his famous WMD speech at the U.N. in February 2003, and the United States launched its attack on the country on the 20th the following month. However, by 2005 the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that the WMD intelligence had been almost entirely false.

Original story at Mainichi Daily News

Bullshit! You fascist shill! Anyone who knew anything about the situation knew that the entire pretext for invading Iraq was false– before the fact– and that the entire war effort was just an opportunity for profiteering by the Vice President’s former corporation, Haliburton, robbing the United States’ public treasury to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars in no-bid contracts.

And the worst part is, beyond the tragic loss of lives, both American Servicemen and Iraqis, is the fact that we’re still paying for this fiasco in the form of record deficits, and the near-elimination of social services that are desperately needed, especially now that the economy is nearly irrevocably ruined.

(Just waiting now for our Chinese Communist creditors to evict us now…)

just one of many leading economic indicators

Goldman Sachs Bailout Hustle

At the height of the housing boom, Goldman was selling billions in bundled mortgage-backed securities — often toxic crap of the no-money-down, no-identification-needed variety of home loan — to various institutional suckers like pensions and insurance companies, who frequently thought they were buying investment-grade instruments. At the same time, in a glaring example of the perverse incentives that existed and still exist, Goldman was also betting against those same sorts of securities — a practice that one government investigator compared to “selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars.”

more on Page 2

Nike claims lies about sweathop conditions constitutes “free speech”

by Glen Emerson Morris

A law suit in California may have a profound effect on how businesses defend their business practices in public, especially on the Internet. For those not familiar with the case, Nike is being sued by a California activist named Marc Kasky for violating California’s truth in advertising law. After being thrown out by lower courts, the case has landed in the U.S. Supreme Court. If the court decides the case should be heard, a new legal standard will be set.

The issues in the case are simple, the implications are not. After losing business in the mid-nineties to charges of funding sweatshop conditions overseas, Nike publicly denied there were major problems, and claimed it enforced a “Code of Conduct” that prohibited overseas factories from abusing workers. Nike did not include these denials in its ads, just in press releases and public statements. The law suit claims Nike knowingly lied about working conditions to improve sales, which amounted to advertising, and therefore the denials are subject to the truth in advertising law.

In its defense, Nike denies the charges of sweatshop conditions, but has chosen to try to avoid court completely on the grounds that its press releases and public statements weren’t ads, and therefore weren’t covered by the California truth in advertising law. Instead, Nike claims the denials were made as free speech, and protected by the First Amendment. Under this argument, whether the denials were the truth or lies is irrelevant.

more…