Critical Art Ensemble

You can tell I'm researching for a curatorial project.

Just came across this from CAE, re- their 2012 project, Winning Hearts and Minds, presented at documenta 13:

War zones are as instructive as they are destructive. Since Vietnam, they have beautifully illustrated the contradiction between capitalism and democracy. . . . The establishment of global democracy has never been a goal of global capital. Its preference is for an authoritarian plutocracy that can be labeled a democracy. This is why the psy-ops principle of “winning hearts and minds” could simultaneously exist with the military strategy of “search and destroy.” Now that winning hearts and minds is not just US policy, but NATO policy, we can see it at work in every conflict in which NATO members have a stake; in every case, the idea of winning over the people through the alleged establishment of democratic institutions never has to be reconciled with unprovoked invasion, house-to-house searches, assassinations, torture, or drone attacks . . . .

Cultural institutions in capitalist nations reflect this same disturbing set of contradictions and relationships. In the field of visual arts, museums tend toward a support of plutocracy through collection building and maintaining the value of collections by functioning as a parallel track to the art market. Institutes, Kunsthalles, and major festivals function as corporate alibis for good cultural citizenship, and too often function within the frame of research and development of cultural products in the service of profit and enterprise. At the same time, these institutions have their democratic side, which usually appears in the form of community outreach, public programming, or education programs. These programs are generally the most impoverished, but are staffed by those who genuinely want to create events promoting social change (and are willing to accept poverty as a given condition to do it). This blend of having few resources together with a strong sense of volunteerism leads to the development of low-cost public events that are subsidized by the free labor of those who create them. Or to put it another way, the poor subsidize the creation of a false alibi that signifies the beneficence of [the] plutocracy. And yet, on an immediate person-to-person level, the results of such performances, exhibitions, and events can be inspiring and culturally valuable.

 * * * * *
Two weeks before the festival started, we issued a call for proposals to use the space for one hour each day at noon; there would be one hundred lunchtime events over the one hundred days. Proposals poured in from around the world. Even though we told those who applied that there was no financial support, and even worse, that they would have to bring all their own equipment, the program filled in a matter of weeks. Most of the events we chose were not curatorially viable (which is not to say we didn’t think they were good projects). As usual, the poor and the marginal were subsidizing the wealthy with free programming.

More at Critical Art Ensemble's website.

Route Opened for Donations to Wikileaks

Per WL Central,

After almost two years of fighting an unlawful banking blockade by U.S financial giants VISA and MasterCard, WikiLeaks has announced it is back open for donations.

After WikiLeaks' publications revealing U.S. war crimes and statecraft in 2010, U.S. financial institutions erected a banking blockade against WikiLeaks wholly outside of any judicial or administrative process. The blockade came during a time of substantial economic growth for WikiLeaks but blocked over 95% of donations, costing the organization in excess of USD 20M.

The Wau Holland Transparency Reports for WikiLeaks' finances, released today, illustrate the financial consequences of 18 consecutive months of economic censorship. For the year 2011, the blockade resulted in WikiLeaks' income falling to just 21% of its operating costs.

WikiLeaks has been forced to run on its cash reserves at the Wau Holland Foundation, which have diminished from EUR 800K at the end of December 2010, to less than EUR 100K at the end of June 2012. As the graph shows, WikiLeaks' reserve funds will expire at the current austere rate of expenditure within a few months. In order to effectively continue its mission, WikiLeaks must raise a minimum of EUR 1M immediately.

More at the link above. You can donate here – that's direct from WL Central and should be reliable; I just donated.

Elites Hiding at Least $20 TRILLION. Seriously.

Per the Guardian,

James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report . . . . He shows that at least £13tn – perhaps up to £20tn – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks.

* * * * *
"The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments," the report says.

The sheer size of the cash pile sitting out of reach of tax authorities is so great that it suggests standard measures of inequality radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor. According to Henry's calculations, £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001% of the world's population – a tiny class of the mega-rich who have more in common with each other than those at the bottom of the income scale in their own societies.

"These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people," said John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network.

Note, that's 13 to 20 trillion British pounds, which per my computer's converter = more than 20 to 31 trillion US dollars.

P.S.: Based on current US census estimates, that's nearly $64,000 for every man, woman, and child in the US. And that's just the offshored stuff; you also have to add in whatever they haven't managed to hide.

Re- the Stalled Recovery,

From Nation of Change:

While the [National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), an organization that often acts as a front for larger corporate interests] warns that minimum wage increases would create serious cost problems for small businesses, few of their members list "labor costs" as their "most important problem." Instead, what we see from the NFIB survey results is that the percentage of small businesses listing labor costs as their most important problem has hovered consistently between 3% and 5% since the beginning of the recession in December 2007. In the most recent data, the percentage fell to 2%, its lowest level since the start of the recession.

* * * * *
Instead of wages, the NFIB survey results suggest that “poor sales” have been — far and away — the biggest concern of small businesses. At the onset of the recession in December 2007 about 9% of firms said that poor sales were their most serious problem. By 2009 and 2010, the share citing poor sales was as high as 34%. In the most recent data, about 21% of all firms still list poor sales as their biggest challenge. The real problem facing firms is not that their low-wage workers earn too much, it is apparently that their customers earn too little [see chart at right.]

Lots more useful info at DU.

The LIBOR Scandal Explained

Or, yet another way in which the rich have been looting you – legible version at Dangerous Minds.

From a comment at Naked Capitalism: "Banking is the only . . . sport where the referees don’t enforce the rules and the fans get severely injured when the players cheat."

UPDATE: The NYT now reports, "Congress intensified its focus on the interest-rate rigging scandal on Thursday, as Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, vowed that authorities would forcefully pursue criminal investigations into some of the world's biggest banks" – awesome! Now, who's going to investigate Timmeh?

Another interesting story: per a report at naked capitalism, LIBOR manipulation was commonly recognized in London by 1991 – when Bob Diamond was in charge of interest rate trading at Morgan Stanley London, "which means his claim that he found out about Libor manipulation at Barclays mere weeks before his Treasury Select testimony was bollocks." One commenter makes an excellent point:

I think this may be a more significant data point than it appears at first glance to us jaded cynics. What it says is that not only are our institutions now utterly corrupt, but that they have been getting that way for a long time. This suggests that the problem is not likely to be random, accidental, or personality driven, but rather that it stems from deep structural causes. That is important because it suggests that that is also where the solutions must be found.

FURTHER UPDATE: Salon has a good article explaining how the LIBOR-rigging affected some of us: "Six Ways Big Banks Screwed Grandma – Grandma's finances will almost certainly never recover from the LIBOR scandal that's rocking the world."

Helpful Image (Restore Glass-Steagall)

(Click on the image for a more legible version.)

UPDATE: From the MetroWest Daily News, quoting but without linking to The Nation:

Why do the losses of Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase matter? The Federal Reserve allowed investment banks to convert to bank holding companies, now owning commercial banks, which are FDIC insured.

William Greider writes in the Nation magazine, “JPMorgan Chase parks all of its vast derivatives holdings in its commercial bank subsidiary, which means the taxpayer is on the hook for these losses since commercial banks are FDIC insured.” Greider further states, “In the event of a collapse, the banks can use its deposit base to pay off the derivatives, while leaving the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to reimburse depositors if their money runs out. JPMorgan has contracts totaling $72 trillion and 99 percent of them are booked at its FDIC- insured bank.”

Continuing — “We are “insuring” other big boys of banking in the same way. Citigroup has nearly all of its $53 trillion in derivatives in its FDIC-insured bank; Goldman Sachs has $44 trillion parked at and FDIC-backed institution. After Bank of America purchased Merrill Lynch, BoA began transferring the securities firm’s derivatives to the FDIC-insured bank, which now holds $47 trillion in contracts.” And the Ryan Republicans want to invest Social Security with these same bankers?

Glenn Greenwald on Assange, WL, the Syrian Emails, Etc.

(Thanks to Democracy Now!)

Updates on Assange & Manning

This is not just an infowar; it's a p.r. war. And most of the p.r. machinery is owned by t.p.t.b.

Neither Assange nor Wikileaks has been charged with any violation of any law in any country on the planet, though not for lack of strenuous effort by the authorities. The allegations against Assange fall far short of anything considered illegal in the US or most other countries, and the women who made them did not want him prosecuted.

He offered to be questioned while in Sweden before departing for the UK – he lingered there for over a month for that purpose – and he repeatedly offered to be questioned while in the UK. But although Swedish police and prosecutors recently travelled to Serbia to question a suspect in another case, they refused to interview Assange in the UK. They don't want to question him; they want him in their possession.

Gary McKinnon, wanted in the US since 2002 for allegedly committing the biggest hack of US military computers of all time, walks free in the UK. Shawn Sullivan, a convicted pedophile wanted in the US since 1994 for alleged sexual violations of three underage girls, walks free in the UK.

On May 26, 2012, the Swedish Foreign Minister announced a visit by US Sec. of State Hillary Clinton; she arrived in Sweden on June 2. This was the first visit to Sweden by a US Sec. of State since Henry Kissinger spent one day there in 1976. Clinton remained in Sweden for a week.

It should be noted that Sweden is known to have cooperated with the US's rendition program, and that at least one innocent individual in its custody, Muhammad al-Zery, though never actually charged, was sent to Eqypt for torture and held for two years in jail without ever seeing a judge.

Without Assange and Wikileaks, a great many terrible crimes committed by various governments and corporations around the world might never have been revealed. This is what has precipitated the unprecedented efforts to shut Wikileaks down and gain possession of Assange.

Assange's Position Re- Extradition & Asylum

The excerpts below are from a statement found on WL Central and made yesterday in front of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and they accurately summarize some of the matters that have been the subjects of misrepresentation most recently.

Yesterday Mr. Assange was served with a letter from the Metropolitan police service requesting that he surrender himself to the Belgravia police station at 11.30 this morning.

Mr Assange has been advised that he should decline to comply with the police request. This should not be considered any sign of disrespect. Under both international and domestic UK law asylum assessments take priority over extradition claims.

The issues faced by Mr. Assange are serious. His life and liberty and the life and liberty of his organization and those associated with it are at stake.

The United States Government has instigated a grand jury investigation against Julian Assange and other “founders or managers” of Wikileaks. Australian diplomats have described this investigation as being of “unprecedented scale and nature." There is irrefutable evidence in the public record of subpoenas being issued and witnesses being compelled to testify against Mr. Assange. WikiLeaks, the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights and other groups have been fighting these subpeonas and other issues arising from the investigation in multiple US courts. US officials have said in open court that the FBI file about the investigation has now reached 42,135 pages. The US department of justice admitted yesterday that its investigation into WikiLeaks proceeds. It is only a matter of time before US authorities begin extradition proceedings against Julian and other leading members of WikiLeaks on various charges including conspiracy to commit espionage. There are credible reports that a sealed indictment has already been made against Mr. Assange. Under US law a sealed indictment can only be made public once Mr. Assange is in custody. For a US official to otherwise acknowledge the existence of a sealed indictment is a criminal offense. The Independent newspaper’s diplomatic correspondent reported that informal talks between the US and Sweden have been conducted.

It should be made clear what would happen if Julian was extradited to the USA. The United Nations special rapporteur for torture, Juan Mendez has formally found that the United States has subjected Julian Assange’s alleged source in this matter, the young soldier Bradley Manning, to conditions amounting to torture. The UN found that the United States subjected Bradley Manning to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”. Mr. Manning has been charged by the US government with the capital offense of “aiding the enemy” in relation to his alleged interaction with Mr. Assange. Bradley Manning has been detained without trial for two years and was placed into solitary confinement for 9 months in his cell for 23 hours a day, stripped naked and woken every 5 minutes. His lawyer and support team say these harsh measures were to coerce him into implicating Julian Assange.

So it is clear that there is a legal process in place which will result in taking Julian to the US, which if allowed to succeed would violate his basic rights.

It is accepted by the UK Supreme Court that Julian Assange has not been charged with any criminal offence in Sweden. It is also accepted that he was by told by Swedish authorities that he was free to leave Sweden. And it is also accepted that he has continuously offered to be interviewed by the Swedish authorities here in the UK, should they wish to do so. Although it is normal procedure, Swedish authorities have refused, without reason, to make the 3 hour trip to London and to interview Julian, causing him to be trapped in the UK under virtual house arrest for 561 days and an additional 10 days in solitary confinement – all without charge. Instead they have issued an INTERPOL Red notice and extradition requests.

Julian and his legal team have previously sought assurances from both the UK government and the Swedish government that they will guarantee safe passage after the completion of legal interviews with Mr Assange and both have [refused]. The Swedish executive publicly announced on June 14 that it would detain Mr. Assange in prison without charge.

Once in Sweden under such grave restrictions it would be impossible for Mr. Assange to exercise his asylum rights.

Mr. Assange did not feel safe from US extradition in the UK. We are all too aware of the abuses of the US-UK extradition treaty. Although Mr. Assange has been trapped in the UK, under dangerous circumstances, he at least has had the freedom to apply for political asylum.

It is in this context that Julian has made the difficult decision to seek refuge inside the Ecuadorian Embassy to ask for asylum.

Julian will remain in the Embassy under the protection of the Ecuadorian government while evidence for his application is being assembled and processed.

See also Glenn Greenwald's summary of the situation and Justice for Assange.

Assange would be a fool to allow himself to fall into the hands of the US or any nation subject to its influence. No doubt t.p.t.b. are too smart to dispose of him in a way that might boost his appeal as a martyr; but once in Swedish or US custody, a lot of things could happen. There could be an unfortunate accident, or he could simply be held incommunicado for a very long time.

Here's a recent BBC piece on the situation:



Below are just some of the revelations made thanks to Wikileaks, as of back in Dec., 2010:

How about the needless gunning down by U.S. military forces of a Reuters cameraman and Iraqi innocents shown in the leaked "Collateral Murder" video? Or, limiting inquiry to the U.S. Embassy cables, what about the revelations that six months before the worldwide economic meltdown, the governor of the Bank of England was secretly proposing a bailout of the world's biggest banks funded by nations such as the U.S.; or that the British government secretly assured the U.S. that it had "put measures in place to protect your interest during the UK inquiry into the causes of the Iraq war"; or that the U.S. dismissed British objections about secret U.S. spy flights taking place from the UK, amid British officials' concerns that the UK would be deemed an accomplice to torture; or that, in response to U.S. pressure, the German government assured the U.S. that it would not follow through on its investigation of the CIA's abduction of a German citizen mistakenly identified as a terrorist, Khaled el-Masri; or that the U.S. threatened the Italian government in order to make sure that no international arrest warrants were issued for CIA agents accused of involvement in the abduction of cleric Abu Omar; or that the U.S. sought assurances from the Ugandan government that it would consult the U.S. before using American intelligence to commit war crimes; or that as of 2009, Shell Oil had infiltrated all the main ministries of the Nigerian government; or that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer paid investigators to unearth corruption links to Nigeria's attorney general so as to pressure him to drop legal action for harm to children from a drug trial; or that government corruption in Afghanistan is rampant (viz. an incident last year when then vice-president Ahmad Zia Massoud was stopped in Dubai while carrying $52m in cash); or that the U.S. seeks to manipulate nations opposed to its approach to global warming; or that the U.S. and China worked together to prevent European nations from reaching an agreement at last year's climate summit; or that the Vatican refused to cooperate with an official Irish inquiry into clerical child abuse; or that BP covered up a giant gas leak in Azerbaijan eighteen months before the Gulf of Mexico disaster? To mention just a few items revealed as of 2010-12-21. (UPDATE: See also Glen Mitchell's "Why Wikileaks Matters" for The Nation; the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "The Best of Cablegate: Where Public Discourse Benefited from the Leaks"; Glenn Greenwald's "What Wikileaks revealed to the world in 2010" at Salon; Wikileaks - A timeline of the top leaks at The Telegraph; and to add just one from 2011 so far, "WikiLeaks points to US meddling . . . to keep the [democratically-elected] Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of Haiti." FURTHER UPDATE: See Greg Mitchell's "32 Major Revelations (and Counting)," including the fact that Wikileaks' publications are widely believed to have helped inspire the uprising in Tunisia against a brutal dictator; OpEd News; Greg Mitchell's top Cablegate picks as of his 100th day of blogging the Wikileaks story, here; and Kevin Gosztola's 100 leaks in 100 tweets, here.

Manning Wins Access to US Damage Assessments

Meanwhile, from AFP:

A US military judge ordered prosecutors Monday to share more documents with WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning after defense lawyers accused them of hiding information that could help their client's case.

For months, Manning's defense team has demanded access to reports by government agencies, including the CIA, that assessed the effect of the leak of classified documents to the WikiLeaks website.

Manning is accused of passing on a massive trove of files to WikiLeaks but his lawyers believe the reports will show the alleged disclosures had no major effect on the country's national security.

Judge Denise Lind ruled that government prosecutors must provide "damage assessment" reports from the CIA, the State Department, the FBI, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (Oncix) and other documents that were relevant for the defense.

I strongly suspect that if the effects of the release were really so damaging to legitimate US interests or to innocents in general, the gov't would by now have managed to identify a few particulars it could afford to make public.

UPDATE: Patrick Cockburn has a fine essay at The Independent:

All governments indulge in a degree of hypocrisy between what they say in public and in private. When democratic openness about general actions and policies is demanded, they pretend they are facing a call for total transparency which would prevent effective government. This deliberate and self-serving inflation of popular demands is usually aimed at the concealment of failure and monopolising power.

* * * * *
Assange and WikeLeaks unmasked not diplomatic reticence in the interests of the smooth functioning of government, but duplicity to justify lost wars in which tens of thousand died. Recent history shows that this official secrecy, frequently aided by "embedding" journalists with armies, works all too well.

In Iraq, in the months before the US presidential election in 2004, foreign embassies in Baghdad all knew and reported that US soldiers were only clinging to islands of territory in a hostile land. But the Bush administration was able to persuade US voters that, on the contrary, it was fighting and winning a battle to establish democracy against the remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime and the adherents of Osama bin Laden.

State control of information and the ability to manipulate it makes the right to vote largely meaningless. That is why people like Julian Assange are so essential to democratic choice.

Much more at the link. Another good one by B.J. Sachs at Counterpunch.

The Results of Austerity

How states that have expanded spending have done as compared to states that have cut back. More at The Atlantic.

The Results of "Trickle Down"

"1) Corporate profit margins just hit an all-time high. Companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before. . . .

"2) Fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades. . . .

"3) Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. This is both cause and effect. One reason companies are so profitable is that they're paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP. And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak: those "wages" are other companies' revenue."

More great charts and other info at Business Insider. And if you like this, you might like this video of Huey Long in 1934.

For immediate action (re- Wikileaks/Assange):

Go here to send a message such as the following:

[To:]
President Rafael Correa
Ecuador
Embassy of Ecuador
1050 30th Street NW
Washington, DC 20007
US

I am a citizen of the United States, but above that, I am a citizen of humanity.

Wikileaks' Julian Assange is a hero who has helped expose terrible acts of injustice around the world and has spoken truth to power regardless of nationality or the consequences to himself.

It now falls to those who recognize what's really happening and have the power to help him to do so, for the sake of humanity as well as for Mr. Assange's sake.

I urge you to grant him asylum. Posterity will honor you for your recognition that the time has come to do what's right, and having had the courage to do it.

Sincerely,

Assange's Appeal Rejected by UK Supreme Court

More on the court's case at Raw Story.

As succinctly summarized at WL Central, Assange, who has already been detained for some 500 days without charge, will be extradited to Sweden "for questioning," even though there is no charge against him for violating any law in any country, the two women who alleged sexual misconduct did not want to press charges but only to have him tested for STD's, and

[before leaving for the UK, he] stayed in Sweden for nearly 5 weeks to answer the allegations. Attempts to arrange an interview were made through his lawyer Björn Hurtig, but all proposed dates were refused. When Mr. Assange left Sweden, he did so only after receiving approval from the Swedish prosecutor on the case, Marianne Ny.

Mr. Assange has offered himself to be questioned via telephone or video link from London, which are perfectly legal methods under Swedish law, despite Prosecutor Ny falsely stating otherwise. All offers by Mr. Assange have been rejected.

* * * * *
If Julian Assange is extradited to Sweden he will be immediately placed in prison, in solitary confinement, and incommunicado. There is no bail system in Sweden, nor is there a time limit to detention . . . .

If he is eventually charged, the trial will be held in secret. Sweden's legal system also features a panel of lay judges who hold no formal legal training and are appointed because of their political affiliation.

Mr. Assange then faces further extradition to the United States, where politicians have openly called for his assassination. Sweden holds a "temporary surrender" agreement with the U.S. which allows extradition without the usual lengthy procedure.

More at the links above; and see Business Insider for more background.

Why the Rich Oppose Unions

How JPMorgan Chase Has Proved We Need to Break Up Big Banks & Bring Back Glass-Steagall

From Robert Reich at Nation of Change:

The bets were “poorly executed” and “poorly monitored,” said [Jamie] Dimon [current CEO of JPMorgan Chase and former Dir. of the Board of the Federal Reserve], a result of “many errors, “sloppiness,” and “bad judgment.” But not to worry. “We will admit it, we will fix it and move on.” Move on? Word on the Street is that J.P. Morgan’s exposure is so large that it can’t dump these bad bets without affecting the market and losing even more money. And given its mammoth size and interlinked connections with every other financial institution, anything that shakes J.P. Morgan is likely to rock the rest of the Street.

Ever since the start of the banking crisis in 2008, Dimon has been arguing that more government regulation of Wall Street is unnecessary. Last year he vehemently and loudly opposed the so-called Volcker rule, itself a watered-down version of the old Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate commercial from investment banking before it was repealed in 1999, saying it would unnecessarily impinge on derivative trading (the lucrative practice of making bets on bets) and hedging (using some bets to offset the risks of other bets).

Dimon argued that the financial system could be trusted; that the near-meltdown of 2008 was a perfect storm that would never happen again. Since then, J.P. Morgan’s lobbyists and lawyers have done everything in their power to eviscerate the Volcker rule — creating exceptions, exemptions, and loopholes that effectively allow any big bank to go on doing most of the derivative trading it was doing before the near-meltdown. And now — only a few years after the banking crisis that forced American taxpayers to bail out the Street, caused home values to plunge by more than 30 percent and pushed millions of homeowners underwater, threatened or diminished the savings of millions more, and sent the entire American economy hurtling into the worst downturn since the Great Depression — J.P. Morgan Chase recapitulates the whole debacle with the same kind of errors, sloppiness, bad judgment, excessively risky trades poorly-executed and poorly-monitored, that caused the crisis in the first place.

In light of all this, Jamie Dimon’s promise that J.P. Morgan will “fix it and move on” is not reassuring. The losses here had been mounting for at least six weeks, according to Morgan. Where was the new transparency that’s supposed to allow regulators to catch these things before they get out of hand? . . . . Let’s hope Morgan’s losses don’t turn into another crisis of confidence and they don’t spread to the rest of the financial sector. But let’s also stop hoping Wall Street will mend itself. What just happened at J.P. Morgan – along with its leader’s cavalier dismissal followed by lame reassurance – reveals how fragile and opaque the banking system continues to be, why Glass-Steagall must be resurrected, and why the Dallas Fed’s recent recommendation that Wall Street’s giant banks be broken up should be heeded.

More at the link.

TPP Negotiations in Dallas this Week

If you liked PIPA and SOPA, you'll probably love the TPP. But only the participating governments and a handful of multinational corporate insiders know for sure, since the negotiations have been conducted in secret – secret, that is, from the public, though not from the corporate insiders who are basically writing the treaty. Thirty-two legal academics from participating countries have written to protest the shut-out; see here. And Occupiers and others have planned a rally and other actions; see, e.g., here.

Meanwhile, here's an educated guess about what just a few of the proposed treaty's provisions probably include (from Public Knowledge):

• Criminalizing Small Scale Copyright Infringement. Under the TPP, downloading music could be considered a crime. Your computer could be seized as a device that aids this offense and your kid could be sent to jail for downloading. Some of these rules are part of US law. The TPP makes them worse and also imposes similar rules on other countries that don’t have them.

• Kicking People Off the Internet. The TPP would encourage your ISP and the content industry to agree to institute measures such as three strikes—which kicks you off your internet connection after three accusations of copyright infringement—and deep-packet-inspection—which is akin to the USPS opening your mail. While we can not be sure exactly what is in the TPP, these examples are derived from a copy of the TPP’s IP chapter that leaked in February last year, the provisions that were reported to be part of earlier drafts of ACTA, and previous free trade agreements that the US has signed.

• Protecting Incidental Copies. The TPP would provide copyright owners power over “buffer copies.” These are the small copies that computers need to make in the process moving data around. With buffer copy protection the number of transactions for which you would need a license from the copyright owner would increase a great deal. One impact of this could be that the music you stream from services such as Pandora could get much more expensive when rights holders demand higher license fees to compensate them for the “additional” copies.

• Locking out the Deaf and Blind. The TPP would prevent the blind from reading DRM protected ebooks and the deaf from inserting closed captioning onto DRM protected DVDs. In the US, the Copyright Office has made rules in the past that allows the blind to break this DRM. But the continuation of these rules is not a guarantee. And the other TPP countries could fail to make similar rules.

And it's believed there's much more, e.g., provisions that would bar developing countries from buying generic drugs, etc.

As Zachary, OWS-NY librarian put it, "[p]owerlessness is what happens when you sit behind your desk and do nothing. Powerlessness is signing an online petition, or commenting on an article, or forwarding an e-mail."

Occupy the Regulatory / Investigatory System

From the Washington Post:

Occupy Wall Street has moved. Its new address: 60 Wall Street.

There, inside a soaring public atrium, dreadlocked teens trade shoulder massages near the evening meditation circle. A young man holds up a sign: “You’re a Federal Reserve $lave.” The dinnertime crowd buzzes over free plates of rice and beans while listening to an improvised, profanity-laden operetta about the evils of agro-giant Monsanto. But amid the din, there’s a small group holding a quieter, and far wonkier, conversation.

* * * * *
After much discussion, the group agreed that the Volcker Rule’s earlier definition of clearing agencies, which banks use for exchanging futures contracts, was “clear and tough and good,” but decided that it was worth double-checking section 17(a) of questions that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission raised about it.

It may sound like technical gobbledygook to an outsider, and, indeed, a few newcomers to Occupy the SEC seem befuddled by the group’s headlong dive into the finer distinctions between proprietary trading and market-making. But the meeting is a glimpse into one of the most surprising iterations of the free-wheeling, anarchic movement: fighting the man through the tedious and Byzantine regulatory process.

More at the WaPo link above.

From truthout:

“How can we help? How can we help? How can we help?”

It’s not your average protest slogan, but it’s what the group chanted today as it marched from Zuccotti Park to 120 Broadway, which houses the office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The AG chairs President Obama’s task force to investigate the routine fraud and abuse that characterized Wall Street during the Bush-era inflation of the housing bubble and precipitated the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession. According to a Schneiderman-penned Daily News Op-Ed, though, the task force has only been furnished with “[m]ore than 50 attorneys,” whereas the Enron investigation alone required over 100, and the Savings and Loan crisis took over 1,000. Wall Street occupiers today, under the banner The May Fourth Committee for Equal Justice Under the Law, offered to fill that void.

* * * * *
Alexis Goldstein, a former net developer and business analyst at three large Wall Street firms, echoed that sentiment. “In January,” she told the crown. “President Obama appointed a financial fraud task force co-chaired by five people to investigate mortgage fraud. He touted it proudly in the State of the Union. But since the task force was created, we’ve seen zero prosecutions brought against the banks who committed securities fraud, conducted robo-signing, and illegally foreclosed on homes. We’ve seen no one thrown in jail following the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

Austin Guest brought a calculator, a pocket protector and news clippings. “I’m good at investigating,” he told me. “Frankly, it doesn’t seem very difficult. People are on record committing fraud. I’m very capable of using Google and a printer.”

More at the truthout link above.

May 1st: General Strike

More info here.

And just in time: if you missed the 99% non-violent action training, you can take it online here.

Occupiers & Others Preparing for General Strike May 1; Noam Chomsky Endorses 99% Spring

Back in the 70's, experts believed that the improvements possible through technology would increase worker productivity to the point that the 40-hour work week would inevitably shrink to 35 or less, and that we'd all have more leisure while enjoying the same or a better standard of living.

Part of that prediction came true: worker productivity in the U.S has exploded since then. Yet instead of having more leisure and greater wealth, our inflation-adjusted incomes have actually dropped, even while our work week has increased to 50 hours and more, and even though, in most families now, both parents work.

What happened? If you read this blog, you already have an idea (e.g., see here or here).

May 1, a holiday in many countries, is the annual commemoration of the 1886 Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, when Chicago police fired on workers during a General Strike for the eight-hour workday. Now, OWS, Occupy Los Angeles, Occupy Chicago, Occupy Oakland, other General Assemblies, Labor organizers, immigrants’ rights groups, artists, faith leaders, and others are preparing for a General Strike on May 1, calling for all of us to take the day away from school and the workplace, to show that we will not continue to accept corporate and governmental systems that exploit the many in order to enrich the few.

More info on the May 1 General Strike here and here.

"99% Spring" is a congruent but separate effort – see my previous post here; more here, here, and here – which has now been endorsed by Noam Chomsky:

Find a Non-Violent Action Training Event Near You

One concern w.r.t. activist efforts during the last few years is that it seems that few of us fully understand just what our rights of free speech and peaceable assembly really include and what to say or do when others try to stop us from exercising them. Also, how could those rights be affected by recent legislation (see, e.g., this, this, or this)?

I personally believe that, the more people who understand the answers to these questions, the better off we'll all be. I hope to receive answers at one of the events being organized per the following from National People's Action, re- an effort called the "99% Spring":

During the week of April 9-15, in small towns and big cities all across America, 100,000 people will come together for an unprecedented national nonviolent, direct action training. We'll learn to tell the story of our economy and what went wrong; we'll learn the history of nonviolent direct action; and, we'll learn how we can take action and create great change in this country.

You can find a training event near you, here.

This is a coordinated effort by, among others: Jobs With Justice, United Auto Workers, National Peoples Action, National Domestic Workers Alliance, MoveOn.org Civic Action, New Organizing Institute, Movement Strategy Center, The Other 98%, Service Employees International Union, Rebuild the Dream, UNITE-HERE, Greenpeace, Institute for Policy Studies, United Steel Workers, Working Families Party, Communications Workers of America, United States Student Association, Rainforest Action Network, American Federation of Teachers, Leadership Center for the Common Good, UNITY, National Guestworker Alliance, 350.org, The Ruckus Society, Citizen Engagement Lab, smartMeme Strategy & Training Project, Right to the City Alliance, Pushback Network, Progressive Democrats of America, Change to Win, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future, Fuse Washington, National Day Laborers Organizing Network, Alliance for a Just Society, The Partnership for Working Families, United Students Against Sweatshops, etc.

UPDATE: Here's a helpful article on the origins of this effort. Here's an article expressing reservations about the effort (based on the fact that its statements omit any objection to the US wars in the Middle East).

FURTHER UPDATE: I just learned that Noam Chomsky has endorsed the 99% Spring coalition .

(Note, 99% Spring is separate from but apparently congruent with other Occupiers' May 1st General Strike.)

Useful Wikileaks Links

My left sidebar's getting too cluttered, so I'm moving most of the Wikileaks links into this post:

~ You can donate to Wikileaks and/or to Assange's defense fund (t.p.t.b. are trying to financially strangle WL.)

~ A website with summary updates on the status of the legal proceedings against Assange, at swedenversusassange.com.

~ A summary of The Case for Wikileaks, with supporting links PLUS (scroll to the bottom) additional useful items and things you can do to help.

~ Ten Things You Need to Know About the Infowar, including Assange's 3-Pronged Strategy per his own writings.

~ Facilities for searching the cables for words or phrases: dazzlepod, cablefinder, leakysearch, cablesearch, and leakspinsauce. UPDATE: Great summary of available facilities, with links, at WL Central.

~ An excellent documentary on Wikileaks, Wikirebels, produced by Sveriges Television.

~ Info about events and protests in support of WL, at WL Central, and a flyer you can distribute, here.

~ Some cool graphics that can help you map the areas addressed by leaked info or provide other info in visual form, here.

And you can find more posts re- Wikileaks here.