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?

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

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

All-out Class Warfare!

Maine Gov. Paul LePage extends war on workers to war on art about workers

by Laura Clawson

Maine Gov. Paul “elected with 38% of the vote” LePage apparently isn’t content with going after collective bargaining rights for workers, raising pension contributions for public employees while exempting himself, and a host of other measures designed to drive down wages and working conditions.

No, his anti-worker crusade extends to artwork.

LePage has ordered a labor history mural removed from the walls of the state’s Department of Labor, and conference rooms renamed so they won’t honor labor leaders.

More at Daily Kos

A brief, and brutal, history of the Chamber of Commerce

by Joan McCarter

Bill McKibben, Kossack, author, and co-founder of 350.org, a global campaign to fight climate change writes the definitive short history of the Chamber of Commerce:

From the outside, you’d think the U.S. Chamber of Commerce must know what it’s doing. It’s got a huge building right next to the White House. It spends more money on political campaigning than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. It spends more money on lobbying that the next five biggest lobbyists combined. And yet it has an unbroken record of error stretching back almost to its founding.

The article goes on:

It starts with the New Deal. The Chamber “accused Roosevelt of attempting to ‘Sovietize’ America; the chamber adopted a resolution ‘opposing the president’s entire legislative package.'” Opposition to FDR continued, shockingly, through the Lend-Lease program, designed to supply the allies with critical material to fight the Germans, and which brought a tremendous boon to American manufacturing. But more, the Chamber opposed American involvement in the war, the war which “triggered the greatest boom in America’s economic history.”

Bill McKibben:

But it’s precisely the kind of blinkered short-sightedness that has led the U.S. Chamber of Commerce astray over and over and over again. They spent the 1950s helping Joe McCarthy root out communists in the trade unions; in the 1960s they urged the Senate to “reject as unnecessary” the idea of Medicare; in the 1980s they campaigned against a “terrible 20” burdensome rules on business, including new licensing requirements for nuclear plants and “various mine safety rules.”

The article continues:

Now, of course, the Chamber fights everything from healthcare reform to environmental action. It’s in the environmental realm, McKibben argues, that the Chamber is shooting American business in the foot, yet again.

McKibben:

That’s why thousands and thousands of American businesses concerned about our energy future have already joined a new campaign, declaring that “The US Chamber Doesn’t Speak for Me.” They want to draw a line between themselves and the hard-right ideological ineptitude that is the U.S. Chamber.

More at Daily Kos

Global Class Warfare: The Fight Joined

by Tasini

I suppose maybe I’m a bit weary of the “check out this new outrage by Scott Walker’s assault on the workers” so time to be positive, forward-looking, at least for a moment, by thinking about a really intriguing effort by the United Auto Workers to take a serious shot at organizing against the stupendous class warfare–by taking it around the globe.

So, in my opinion, and I do not think this is a particularly original thought, there is just no way to defeat the current state of class warfare by keeping the offense within our own borders. Our world is littered every day with examples of the global scale of class warfare–whether it be the worldwide financial pollution brought to us courtesy of Goldman Sachs-Citibank-Robert Rubin-AIG et al or the foolish wage-depressing assault via, among other things, middle-class destroying trade deals.

To which the UAW says:

The United Auto Workers outlined a new push to recruit U.S. workers at one or more foreign auto makers and will bolster the effort by training and sending activists abroad to organize rallies and protests in support of the union campaign.

On Tuesday, UAW leaders meeting here described plans to reach out to foreign unions and consumers in what would be their first major campaign since failed efforts in the last decade at Nissan Motor Co. and auto-parts supplier Denso Corp. They hope to be more successful by reaching out to foreign unions at the auto makers’ overseas plants and bringing pressure from prayer vigils, fasts or protests at dealerships.

And…

The UAW has set aside tens of millions of dollars from its strike fund to bankroll its campaign. International actions are to be coordinated with foreign unions and run by some three dozen student interns recruited globally, UAW officials said. When the interns return to their home countries after learning about the UAW efforts in the U.S., they’ll be expected to organize protests against the auto maker, UAW officials said.

The UAW also set up a team to identify weaknesses of foreign-owned auto makers that it can use to apply public pressure, according to a person familiar with the matter. This could include highlighting matters such as past safety problems.

More at Daily Kos

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

Kosovo, Ukraine, and US / Russia relations

from

Bush recognizes Kosovo, says will bring peace

By Deborah Charles
Reuters
Tuesday, February 19, 2008; 1:07 AM

DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) – President George W. Bush on Tuesday recognized the independence of Kosovo from Serbia and said it would bring peace to the Balkans.

He told reporters in Tanzania: “History will prove this will be a correct move to bring peace to the Balkans. The United States supports this move because we believe it will bring peace.”

from

Kosovo Gains Recognition By U.S., Some in Europe

By Peter Finn and Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 19, 2008

President Bush, traveling in Africa, hailed the new state’s “special friendship” with the United States, promising to set up a U.S. embassy there and inviting Kosovo to establish a diplomatic mission in Washington. Asked Tuesday about Russia’s opposition, Bush told reporters, “There’s a disagreement, but we believe as do many other nations that history will prove this to be the correct move.”

In a letter Monday to President Fatmir Sejdiu, Bush said, “On behalf of the American people, I hereby recognize Kosovo as an independent and sovereign state.”

So, what’s the problem?

Russia warns US over Kosovo move

BBC News

Russia has warned the US that Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia endangers international stability.

“We confirmed our principled position on the unacceptability of unilateral actions by Pristina declaring its independence,” the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement, following talks between Mr Lavrov and Ms Rice.

“We underlined the dangerous consequences of such a step, which threatens the destruction of world order and international stability which have developed over decades,” the statement said.

But what does Russia have to be afraid of?

Putin Threatens Ukraine On NATO

Russian Raises Issue Of U.S. Missile Shield

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 13, 2008

MOSCOW, Feb. 12 — President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia could aim nuclear missiles at Ukraine if its neighbor and former fraternal republic in the Soviet Union joins the NATO alliance and hosts elements of a missile defense system proposed by the Bush administration.

“It is horrible to say and even horrible to think that, in response to the deployment of such facilities in Ukrainian territory, which cannot theoretically be ruled out, Russia could target its missile systems at Ukraine,” Putin said at a joint news conference with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who was visiting the Kremlin. “Imagine this just for a second.”

Who else but Russia has the missile capability to necessitate a missile shield. In light of this, to try to pass it off as defense against “rogue nations” and/or terrorists is disingenuous. And no wonder Russia is worried about the US forming a “special friendship” with yet another former Eastern Bloc nation.