Melanie Newman & Oliver Wright - Caught on camera: top lobbyists boasting how they influence the PM

Melanie Newman, Oliver Wright
The Independent, 6 December 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/caught-on-camera-top-lobbyists-boasting-how-they-influence-the-pm-6272760.html

*Special undercover investigation: Executives from Bell Pottinger reveal 'dark arts' they use to burnish reputations of countries accused of human rights violations

One of Britain's largest lobbying companies has been secretly recorded boasting about its access to the heart of the Government and how it uses the "dark arts" to bury bad coverage and influence public opinion. An undercover investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, published in The Independent today, has taped senior executives at Bell Pottinger:

* Claiming they have used their access to Downing Street to get David Cameron to speak to the Chinese premier on behalf of one of their business clients within 24 hours of asking him to do so;

* Boasting about Bell Pottinger's access to the Foreign Secretary William Hague, to Mr Cameron's chief of staff Ed Llewellyn and to Mr Cameron's old friend and closest No 10 adviser Steve Hilton;

* Suggesting that the company could manipulate Google results to "drown" out negative coverage of human rights violations and child labour;

* Revealing that Bell Pottinger has a team which "sorts" negative Wikipedia coverage of clients;

* Saying it was possible to use MPs known to be critical of investigative programmes to attack their reporting for minor errors.

Reporters from the Bureau posed as agents for the government of Uzbekistan – a brutal dictatorship responsible for killings, human rights violations and child labour – and representatives of its cotton industry in a bid to discover what promises British lobbying and public relations firms were prepared to make when pitching to clients, what techniques they use, and how much of their work is open to public scrutiny.

In Uzbekistan, child labour is used in cotton fields to fulfil state quotas and the country also has a terrible human rights record: the think tank Freedom House put it on its 2011 list of the "Worst of the Worst" repressive regimes.

'I've been working with Hilton, Cameron, Osborne, for 20 years'

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Glenn Greenwald - Congress endorsing military detention, a new AUMF

SALON.COM   THURSDAY, DEC 1, 2011 5:00 AM ESTHTTP://WWW.SALON.COM/2011/12/01/CONGRESS_ENDORSING_MILITARY_DETENTION_A_NEW_AUMF/SINGLETON/#COMMENTS

BY GLENN GREENWALD

(updated below – Update II)

A bill co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin and GOP Sen. John McCain  (S. 1867) — included in the pending defense authorization bill — is predictably on its way to passage. It is triggering substantial alarm in many circles, including from the ACLU – and rightly so. But there are also many misconceptions about it that have been circulating that should be clarified, including a possible White House veto. Here are the bill’s three most important provisions:

(1) mandates that all accused Terrorists be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civilian court system; it alsounquestionably permits (but does not mandate) that even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil accused of Terrorism be held by the military rather than charged in the civilian court system (Sec. 1032);

(2) renews the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) with more expansive language: to allow force (and military detention) against not only those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and countries which harbored them, but also anyone who “substantially supports” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces” (Sec. 1031); and,

(3) imposes new restrictions on the U.S. Government’s ability to transfer detainees out of Guantanamo (Secs. 1033-35).

There are several very revealing aspects to all of this. First, the 9/11 attack happened more than a decade ago; Osama bin Laden is dead; the U.S. Government claims it has killed virtually all of Al Qaeda’s leadership and the group is “operationally ineffective” in the Afghan-Pakistan region; and many commentators insisted that these developments would mean that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. And yet here we have the Congress, on a fully bipartisan basis, acting not only to re-affirm the war but to expand it even further: by formally declaring that the entire world (including the U.S.) is a battlefield and the war will essentially go on forever.

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Pratap Chatterjee - The New Cyber-Industrial Complex Spying on Us

Published on Saturday, December 3, 2011 by the Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/dec/02/cyber-industrial-complex-spying

WikiLeaks' Spy Files reveal the frightening scale and ambition of the industry now devoted to surveillance of all our daily lives

by Pratap Chatterjee

We live digital lives now, flitting from Facebook to YouTube, checking our iPhones and BlackBerries, and chatting with our loved ones on Skype. Very few of us worry too much about tweeting our personal opinions on politics or chatting with a new social network "friend" on the other side of the world, whom we barely know and often forget in a matter of a few hours or days.

Yet all these interactions have become fodder for a new industry that secretly vacuums up the data and preserves it forever on high-end servers that hold many petabytes (a million gigabytes) of information. This industry offers new tools to search that data and reconstruct our past, and even our real-time movements via our mobile phones, in a way that could well come back to haunt us.

WikiLeaks has just released the Spy Files – a trove of almost 300 documents from these companies that shine a light into this industry. At the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, where I work, we trawled through these documents, and tracked down yet more material which our research team – Matthew Wrigley, David Pegg, Christian Jensen and Jamie Thunder – used to create an online database that will soon cover over 160 companies in some 25 countries.

It's worth spending some time browsing through this material because what this new industry offers to do is nothing short of Orwellian.

"We all aware of traditional spy stories of intelligence agencies like MI5 bugging the phones of one or two people," Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, told the Bureau. He continued:

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Renee Parsons - Senate Approves Indefinite Detention

http://trueblueprogressivereport.blogspot.com/2011/12/senate-approves-indefinite-detention.html

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2011

By Renee Parsons – A True Blue Progressive

If Al Qaeda needed a recruitment tool for its dwindling numbers, its operatives simply needed to video tape the Senate’s recent consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act (S. 1867).  

What should have been a serious discussion on the cost and moral authority of the President’s endless war policy stretching U.S. military tentacles around the globe morphed instead into a platform for endless harangues about American ‘traitors’ during WWII, inflamed passions about ‘terrorists’, bipartisan ravings in fear of Iran, redefining the Constitution and other war-mongering subjects.    

The grim reality is that with the country presumably on the edge of a cataclysmic deficit crisis, Senate Democrats who once might have been expected to support the Rule of Law, lined up on the side of a $690 billion appropriation for the Pentagon including $119 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with NO debate on military funding over the country’s favored People Programs or the Constitutionality of drone attacks.   

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Stephen Lendman - America Lurches Toward Full-Blown Tyranny

By Stephen Lendman/12-3-11

Join Stephen Lendman Thursdays @ 11:30am(ET) and Saturdays and Sundays @ 1pm(ET) for his great show "The Progressive Radio News Hour." 

Post-9/11, America's moved steadily toward eroding democracy entirely. Justification given is war on terror hokum. Incrementally, international, constitutional and statute laws have been trashed. Equity, justice and other democratic values long ago were abandoned to advance America's imperium. On May 26, the House voted to abolish freedom entirely - HR 1540, 322 - 96. On December 1, the Senate did likewise - S. 1867, 93 to 7. Both versions assure no one anywhere is now safe, including law-abiding US citizens.

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Robert Reich - The Rebirth of Social Darwinism

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Rebirth-of-Social-Darw-by-Robert-Reich-111201-487.html

December 1, 2011 By Robert Reich Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. If one of the current crop of Republican hopefuls becomes president, and if regressive Republicans take over the House or Senate, or both, Social Darwinism is back. What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I've been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America. They say they want a smaller government but that can't be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government's powers of search and surveillance inside the United States -- eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, "securing" the nation's borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life. They call themselves conservatives but that's not it, either. They don't want to conserve what we now have. They'd rather take the country backwards -- before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour workweek, laws against child labor, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

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Dina Rasor - The Pentagon Flunks Another Audit

Thursday 24 November 2011

by: Dina Rasor, Truthout | Solutions

http://www.truth-out.org/pentagon-flunks-another-audit/1322085539

How can you know what to cut if you don't know where the money is going?

The military-industrial complex is in high alert. They can't really believe that the Obama administration will keep its word and veto any Congressional action that would try and get the Pentagon out from the sequestration problem of cutting over a half a trillion from the Department of Defense (DoD) budget over the next ten years. If they are confident it won't happen, they are doing a good job of panicking over the cuts

for public consumption and to protect their turf.

News articles and columns are popping up with various lists of what could be cut to come up with the money, and the DoD is maneuvering to offer up cuts on military pensions and health care, readiness and training budgets to save the required amount of money without touching their holy grail, the overpriced and ineffective weapons systems.

Although the DoD acts like Armageddon is just around the corner with these looming proposed cuts, it is really still looking at the low-hanging fruit. There is more than enough money left to fund national security if the Pentagon would change its ways.

Winslow Wheeler, the director of the Straus Military Reform Project, points out what a realistic cut this is when put in context:

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Dennis Kucinich - A Revelation; The Fed Grants $7.77 Trillion in Secret Bank Loans – The Fed Works for Banks, Not The Rest of America

Dennis Kucinich/ November 29, 2011

Kucinich’s NEED Act Would Reclaim Monetary Authority for the People, Save Homes and Put Americans Back to Work

WASHINGTON - November 29 - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a longtime advocate for reform of the Federal Reserve, is sharply criticizing the Federal Reserve today after Bloomberg news reported that the Federal Reserve secretly committed nearly $8 trillion in support to American and international financial institutions during the 2008 bailout. Kucinich recorded a video for his website before going to the floor of the House of Representatives to call upon Congress to reclaim its Constitution primacy over monetary policy.

Kucinich also called threats by ratings agency to downgrade U.S. debt a threat to our national sovereignty.

“The Federal Reserve extended extraordinary support to financial institutions that crashed the economy with reckless speculation, and on that support many of the firms made billions in profit and paid obscene bonuses. The Fed asked for nothing from these firms in return and that is because the Federal Reserve works first and foremost for the welfare of private financial institutions, not the American economy.

“The message that emerges from these revelations for Americans who have lost their jobs, lost their homes, or watched their retirement nest eggs disappear is that we have unlimited resources available for the banks, but nothing for the American people,” Kucinich stated.

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Amnesty International - United States Must Halt Life Without Parole Sentences for Children, says Amnesty International

Human Rights Organization Details Stories of Three Young Offenders From Louisiana, Illinois and North Carolina, in New Juvenile Justice Report

Louisiana Case to be Featured in Amnesty International’s Global Write-a-Thon

WASHINGTON - November 30 - Authorities in the United States must ban the imposition of life without parole sentences against children and review the cases of more than 2,500 prisoners currently serving such sentences to bring the sentences into line with international law, Amnesty International said today in a new report.

"In the United States, people under 18 cannot vote, buy alcohol or lottery tickets or consent to most forms of medical treatment, but they can be sentenced to die in prison for their actions. This needs to change,” said Natacha Mension, U. S. campaigner at Amnesty International (AI).

Children as young as 11 at the time of the crime have faced life imprisonment without parole in the United States – the only country in the world to impose this sentence on children.

Amnesty International’s 34-page report 'This is where I’m going to be when I die': Children facing life imprisonment without the possibility of release in the United States,illustrates the issue through the stories of Christi Cheramie, Jacqueline Montanez and David Young.

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Peter Van Buren - No Free Speech at Mr. Jefferson’s Library

Posted on November 27, 2011, Printed on November 28, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175472/

George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury Would Have Recognized Morris Davis's Problem 
By Peter Van Buren

Here’s the First Amendment, in full: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Those beautiful words, almost haiku-like, are the sparse poetry of the American democratic experiment.  The Founders purposely wrote the First Amendment to read broadly, and not like a snippet of tax code, in order to emphasize that it should encompass everything from shouted religious rantings to eloquent political criticism.  Go ahead, reread it aloud at this moment when the government seems to be carving out an exception to it large enough to drive a tank through.

As the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, like those pepper-sprayed at UC Davis or the Marine veteran shot in Oakland, recently found out, the government’s ability to limit free speech, to stopper the First Amendment, to undercut the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, is perhaps the most critical issue our republic can face. If you were to write the history of the last decade in Washington, it might well be a story of how, issue by issue, the government freed itself from legal and constitutional bounds when it came to torture, the assassination of U.S. citizens, the holding of prisoners without trial or access to a court of law, the illegal surveillance of American citizens, and so on.  In the process, it has entrenched itself in a comfortable shadowland of ever more impenetrable secrecy, while going after any whistleblower who might shine a light in.

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