Tana Ganeva - 7 Privacy Threats the Constitution Can't Protect You Against

The week before last, the Roberts Supreme Court uncharacteristically handed down a decisionthat doesn't radically infringe on civil liberties. The justices unanimously ruled that police overshot their authority by planting a GPS device on suspected drug dealer Antoine Jones' car without a warrant, tracking his movements for over a month. For now, Americans can rest assured that police can't secretly tag them -- at least without a warrant.

At the same time, privacy advocates pointed out -- and some of the justices admitted -- that the court's majority opinion in US vs. Jones completely skirted more pressing privacy issues. The problem, the majority argued, was that police had trespassed on Jones' private property by planting a GPS device on his car. The majority opinion did not address whether or not it's okay for law enforcement to use a sophisticated surveillance technology to log someone's movements for a whole month without a warrant. 

In separate, concurring opinions Justices Alito and Sotomayor both warned of the multitude of surveillance technologies that do not require intrusion onto private property to trample privacy rights. Here's a (non-comprehensive) breakdown of existing or impending technologies that make our privacy protections wildly outdated. 

1. Everything you use, all the time.

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http://www.alternet.org/story/153999/7_privacy_threats_the_constitution_can%27t_protect_you_against

Robert Hunziker - Third World Capitalism

How did this happen? America, the czar of capitalism, is becoming a third world country!

According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau report 46.2 million Americans are poor. Of course, the naysaying dissenters claim poor families, as defined in the U.S., include households with adequate food most of the time, a home, a TV, a telephone, and likely a DVD and/or a PC, and a car. Not so bad after all! This is likely very true; however, consider the poverty threshold, as defined by the Census Bureau, for a family with two children in 2010 at $22,113; dissenting naysayers say: So what, over three billion people live on less than $2.50 per day. So, what’s up with this claim that 46.2 million people in America are poor? Are they really poor?

A typical family of four in America spends $664.20 per month on food, assuming they eat on a low-cost plan, according to the USDA statistics; a liberal plan is $1013.80/mo. This means the family has $1,178.55/mo. remaining for everything else like health insurance of $414/mo., which is the nationwide average monthly premium. Thus, the family of four has 764.55 remaining for items like car payments, and the average car payment in America is $475, but since these are the poor, let’s assume it is half this amount for an inferior car or $237.50/mo., and average car insurance according to a national index is $137.91/mo. and median monthly housing costs run about $700 for renters. Adding and subtracting all above= a negative $310.86 per month. Thus, the average family of four has to cut out $310.86/mo. from food, health insurance, transportation, or housing costs in order to break even. No wonder so many Americans do not have health insurance because if they eliminate health insurance, they have $103.14, or $3.44 per day, left over for washing clothes, dental, movies, shopping for clothing or shoes, books, magazines, gasoline, car repairs, emergency expenses and whatever else one desires. They really are poor!

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HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2012/02/03/THIRD-WORLD-CAPITALISM/

Danny Schechter - Is The Past The Future? The News Dissector Reports From and on Iran

Listen to The News Dissector weekly on Friday's at 1pm only on PRN.fm

The TV series House of Lies is about business but it could as easily be about government and foreign policy.

In a recent episode, one of the management consultants pitches a company about the need to launch a new product. She recounts the story of the Polaroid Company known as the Apple of its day, widely admired for the cool design of its instant cameras.

When I lived in Cambridge MA, Polaroid was one of the town’s biggest employers, an economic powerhouse.

But soon it was gone. It failed to see new competitive products on the horizon. It only saw the past as its future.

It went bankrupt.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/07

John Feffer - The Next Marx

Lenin graces the cover of a recent issue of The Economist. The Financial Times is running an entire series on the “crisis in capitalism.” Francis Fukuyama, a recovering neoconservative,makes a plea in Foreign Affairs for the left to get its intellectual act together. And that noted class warrior Newt Gingrich has been assailing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for being a ruthless moneybags.

Excuse me? Does the left hand know what the right hand is doing? What parallel universe did we all just stumble into? It’s not the first time, of course, that the political spectrum has become all jumbled. Ten years ago, the 9/11 attacks sent some liberals scurrying rightward in support of the Bush administration’s extended response. The disastrous aftermath of the Iraq War then pushed even some leading neoconservative lights, like Fukuyama, in the other direction. The aftershocks of this upheaval can still be felt in the debate around the Libya intervention and the “right to protect” doctrine.

Read More:

http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/the_next_marx

Richard Brenneman - Steve Chu fulfills Eisenhower's darkest nightmare

The headline of the announcement from Julie Chao of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [LBNL] says it all: "National Labs Seek Closer Industry Ties."

In his farewell address to the nation, Dwight David Eisenhower sounded the now-familiar alarm of the danger of growing power of the military/industrial complex, a power that might be said to have its foundation in Berkeley, a point we'll take up later.

But less familiar to most is that the military and industry were only two of three components of the force force Eisenhower saw gaining ascendancy over the nation.

Here's the part of that same address which rarely, if ever, gets noted [emphasis added]:

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http://richardbrenneman.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/steve-chu-fulfills-eisenhowers-darkest-nightmare/ 

Paul Craig Roberts - Drowning In Hypocrisy: War Abroad, Austerity at Home

The US government is so full of self-righteousness that it has become a caricature of hypocrisy.  Leon Panetta, a former congressman who Obama appointed CIA director and now head of the Pentagon, just told the sailors on the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, that the US is maintaining a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers in order to project sea power against Iran and to convince Iran that “it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.” 

If it requires 11 aircraft carriers to deal with Iran, how many will Panetta need to project power against Russia and China?  But to get on with the main point, Iran has been trying “to deal with us through diplomacy.”  The response from Washington has been belligerent threats of military attack, unfounded and irresponsible accusations that Iran is making a nuclear weapon, sanctions and an oil embargo. Washington’s accusations echo Israel’s and are contradicted by Washington’s own intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency.  Why doesn’t Washington respond to Iran in a civilized manner with diplomacy?  Really, which of the two countries is the greatest threat to peace?

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28863

Simon Johnson - The Libertarian and the Lobbyists

WASHINGTON, DC – In the three years since the global financial crisis erupted, two dominant views of what went wrong have emerged. It is crucial that we understand each, because their implications for policymakers – and thus for the future health and stability of the global economy – could not be greater.

The first view is that governments simply lost control of the situation, either through incompetence or because politicians were pursuing their own agendas. This is the view heard most frequently from the political right – for example, from people who think that the main problem in the run-up to the financial meltdown of 2008 was government housing policies.

In the United States, among the candidates still competing for the Republican Party’s nomination to challenge Barack Obama in November’s presidential election, Ron Paul stands out for arguing consistently that government is the problem, not the answer, with regard to banking. If the government were removed more fully from the financial sector (including abolishing the Federal Reserve), he argues, the economy would function better.

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http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/johnson28/English

Glen Ford - Haiti, Raped by the US Since 2004, and Still Bleeding

The horrific squandering of Haitian lives and earthquake relief and aid dollars by the occupying powers over the past two years are direct consequences of previous imperial crimes. “Since 2004, Haiti has been methodically stripped of its sovereignty, made into a protectorate of the United Nations,” which is merely a front for the United States. “The earthquake of January 2010 was a natural phenomenon that happened to take place while a rape was in progress."

In the American media, Haiti is most often spoken of as a tragedy – when it is actually the scene of horrific crimes, mainly perpetrated by the United States over the span of two centuries. For the past two years, since the earthquake that shook the life out of hundreds of thousands of already deeply wounded people, the United States has flexed every superpower muscle to prolong Haiti’s agony.

Half a million people are still homeless, two years after the quake, despite the billions in relief and recovery aid pledged by international donors. Sixty percent of the rubble has yet to be removed from the capital and its suburbs, and 6,000 people have died from a cholera epidemic brought into the country by United Nations troops. The UN has still not seen fit to apologize for being the vector of disease, because the UN is not accountable to the people of Haiti – only to the United States. The Americans used a huge chunk of their so-called aid money to reimburse themselves for the cost of their military occupation of the country. Dead, dying, sick, starving, homeless Haitians are made to pay for their own imprisonment in their native land, while Washington gloats that it is Haiti’s last, best hope, and that the catastrophic earthquake might have been a good thing, a chance for a “new beginning” under Washington's firm guidance.

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http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/haiti-raped-us-2004-and-still-bleeding

Ravi Batra - The Cost of Trickle-Down Government Job Creation: $1.5 Million Per Worker

Suppose I were to tell you that for the past two years the federal government has been spending nearly $1.5 million to create one job, what would your reaction be? Would it be one of disbelief and bewilderment? But suppose I were to prove my statement by citing official data, then how would you react? Well, you make up your own mind, but my response is that the administration's advisers should rethink their approach. Does it make sense to spend so much money to generate one job when the average wage is less than $50,000 per year? In fact, this policy is so foolish that it might even be better just to hand over the average salary to the unemployed so they stay calm, make both ends meet and create consumer demand.

Let me prove my point. The administration's tack is that we should keep spending money at the current rate to preserve jobs, even though the annual federal budget deficit has been around $1.4 trillion over the past two years. In fact, the government even plans to increase its shortfall by raising the size of the payroll tax cut. It seems apparent that the main purpose of excessive federal spending is to preserve or generate jobs. This is a point emphasized by every American president since 1976, and especially since 1981 when the federal deficit began to soar. This is also how most experts defend the deficit nowadays.

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http://www.truth-out.org/cost-government-job-creation-15-million-worker/1325800265

Medea Benjamin & Charles Davis - Obama's Pentagon Strategy, A Leaner, More Efficient Empire

In an age when U.S. power can be projected through private mercenary armies and unmanned Predator drones, the U.S. military need no longer rely on massive, conventional ground forces to pursue its imperial agenda, a fact President Barack Obama is now acknowledging. But make no mistake: while the tactics may be changing, the U.S. taxpayer -- and poor foreigners abroad -- will still be saddled with overblown military budgets and militaristic policies.

Speaking January 5 alongside his Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the president announced a shift in strategy for the American military, one that emphasizes aerial campaigns and proxy wars as opposed to "long-term nation-building with large military footprints." This, to some pundits and politicians, is considered a tectonic shift.

Indeed, the way some on the left tell it, the strategy marks a radical departure from the imperial status quo. "Obama just repudiated the past decade of forever war policy," gushed Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, calling the new strategy a "[s]lap in the face to the generals."

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/07