August 6, 2011 at 16:58:56

Corporate America: Facilitators of War, Killers of Jobs, Destroyers of Democracy

By michael payne (about the author)

Problem by tempe.gov

Why does America remain caught in this continuing, seemingly insurmountable, crisis? Why has our manufacturing sector collapsed, why are we locked into an agenda of permanent war and why are we witnessing the steady erosion of our democracy? Who or what should we blame for the monumental damage that is being done to this nation?

While some of the blame might be placed on many different entities and institutions, the mass of evidence points to one in particular; it's Corporate America. Yes, it's that business sector that has long been one of the foundations of America and a bedrock of this economy. So if corporations have been a mainstay of this economy why would I point to them as the root of our problems? Jut what evidence is there to prove that to be a fact; why are corporations being blamed?

It's become quite evident that Corporate America has greater goals in mind than just involving itself in the commerce of the nation; it wants a much greater role in setting and controlling our nation's direction and national agenda by using its power and influence over the government and the society. And its success in doing so becomes more and more evident when we see those who we have elected to public office fall under its dominion and control.

American corporations are not inherently bad or evil; I do understand that their objective is to generate profits and dividends for their investors and that they are not intended to be social organizations. However, in recent decades they have shown themselves to be a negative rather than a positive force; they don't want to employ American workers, they want cheap overseas labor, they want tax breaks and incentives as U.S. corporations; they want it all.

Yes I am accusing Corporate America of being the foremost reason why this nation finds itself in such a deep dilemma. But is it fair to lay the primary blame at the feet of corporations when they are still an important part of this nation's economic base? Yes, in my opinion, it is entirely fair because their agenda and strategies are at the center of this nation's most critical problems. Corporate America is the relentless, overwhelming power that:

Facilitates war - the gigantic defense industry is one of the few manufacturing sectors in America that is robust, highly profitable and growing; but, in order to maintain this position, it must promote an agenda of perpetual war. This part of Corporate America has become a facilitator of war in order to guarantee its continued existence and it has become very adept at doing just that. It has an army of lobbyists in Washington that blankets the Congress, using its suffocating influence to promote its agenda.

Corporate America and this Congress, mainly Republicans, have become very close associates. Campaign contributions and many other perks are channeled to those selected "patriotic and dedicated" elected representatives of the American people who loyally support and fund the Defense Department. Anyone who dares question the costs or lengths of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations is labeled as being unpatriotic. Corporate power and influence in this Congress is extensive and pervasive. And these relentless efforts have worked beautifully for the wars continue fully funded and unabated.

The American people want no more war, they are well aware that wars are destroying this nation's financial base. However, Corporate America wants unending war, they have this government solidly behind them and it will not be deterred.

Destroys jobs - the U.S. manufacturing sector might still be vibrant and the backbone of our economy if not for the greed of these corporations. They wanted greater and greater profits and so they decided to toss the American worker overboard and pledge their total allegiance and loyalty not to America but to foreign nations and their cheap slave labor. While corporate profits soar, that practice has hurt this nation terribly as the diminished purchasing power of many millions of unemployed workers has crippled our consumer-driven economy. Corporations win while workers and the nation lose.

What this country drastically needs is for President Obama, for once, to show some courage and leadership in standing up for the American worker and taking the fight directly to Congress to do something of substance about our nation's greatest need; to create jobs, jobs, and more jobs. His actions to date have been nothing short of abysmal; he says we need jobs, we must have jobs and then he does nothing specific to lead an ambitious movement in that direction. If he did he would have the full support and backing of the majority of Americans and he would win the fight. But he continues to miss a great opportunity to restore stability to this nation. Is it the power and influence of Corporate America that is behind his failure to act?

Is destroying the American democracy - how are corporations destroying our democracy? Let me tell you the ways. After the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same right of freedom of speech as a person, their campaign contributions to those who they want to place in power in Congress and state governments have reached monumental proportions. Corporations have, in effect, usurped the power of the American people and are hard at work to make sure that the opinions of the citizens of this nation become irrelevant.

Corporations have been extremely active in funding Republican governors and state legislators in order to dismantle America's union movement and public sector jobs. They are behind the dirty tactics by which their Republican associates are using every means possible to slow down or restrict the ability of voters to cast their votes. They are also very responsible for the layoffs of thousands of teachers, police and firefighters.

Destroys financial and environmental regulations and safeguards -- one of the greatest objectives of Corporate America and its main subsidiary, the Republican Party, is to eliminate every regulation and control that affects corporate profits. Therefore, they have been very busy working to do away with regulations involving drilling for oil, on land or in the sea, those in the mining industries, and those which safeguard the air we breathe and the water we drink. Do they have any qualms about doing harm to the people of this society with their deceitful partnership with the Congress? Absolutely not, they have their agenda and they care nothing of the harm they do to this nation and its people.

Stifles, suffocates the creation of new industries - the massive petroleum industry is using this Congress to block any and all attempts to have the U.S. government fund new industries to develop new, alternate sources of energy needed to end America's addiction to imported oil. These corporations are the most profitable in America and in the world, and yet they get billions in special subsidies-- that they don't need. Why doesn't this Congress take these misused subsidies and invest them in creating and developing aggressive and innovative programs to develop new sources of energy? Because corporate pressure forbids it.

These legislators will simply not take the steps that are absolutely critical to America's energy future. Unless these programs are started soon, as petroleum becomes much more scarce and costly, our energy problems will be magnified to the point that every element of this society will be adversely affected. Nothing is happening in this area of need because these corporations feed money into Congress to make absolutely certain that any attempts to fund new energy programs are blocked.

Any elected representatives of the American people who specifically take corporate money in any form and respond by taking actions that harm the nation in which they live to facilitate wars, by eliminating vital entitlement programs, stifling any attempts to develop alternate sources of energy, doing away with important financial and environmental controls and regulations, and otherwise acting to benefit Corporate America at the expense of the nation -- is morally corrupted and a traitor to this nation and its democracy.

What's happening in America is becoming very alarming in what it portends for the future. The thought that the power and might of Corporate America could replace our democracy is frightening; and yet, as events seem to be unfolding, it can certainly happen. If there ever was a time in the history of this nation that called for Americans to stand up and do everything in their power to prevent such a national disaster, that time is now. Corporate America must be stopped in its tracks by every means at our disposal.

Michael Payne is an independent progressive activist who writes articles about social, economic and political matters as well as American foreign policy. He is a U.S. Army veteran. His major goal is to convince Americans that our perpetual wars must (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

S&P's Hypocrisy

The Daily Beast

Ratings Agency Hypocrites

S&P’s downgrade carries a large dose of irony, since the extra debt the U.S. has piled on recently came courtesy of S&P's moronic toxic asset ratings.

Aug 7, 2011 7:06 AM EDT

Can’t say rating agencies don’t have a sense of humor. Last weekend, the painfully embarrassing bipartisan political drama to raise the U.S. debt ceiling centered around doing whatever it took to avoid losing our sacrosanct AAA credit rating. This weekend, under cover of a Friday night, with markets safely closed and global traders gone for the weekend, the best-known rating agency, Standard and Poor’s, basically mooned U.S. economic policy.

On one main score, S&P’s downgrade rationale is right: Washington policy-making is decidedly "dysfunctional.” In fact, that’s a seismic understatement.

But that would also be a fair description of S&P’s decision-making in recent years. Remember: In the run-up to this very financial crisis, for which our debt creation machine at the Treasury Department ramped into over-drive, S&P was raking in fees for factory-stamping "AAA" approval on assets whose collateral was hemorrhaging value.

That high class rating was the criterion hurdle that allowed international cities, towns and pension funds to scoop up those assets, and then borrow against them because of their superior quality, and later suffer devastating losses and bankruptcies when the market didn’t afford them the value that the S&P AAA rating would have implied.

Perhaps, this downgrade is S&P’s way of saying, we’re on it now—we’re not going to give bad debt a pass anymore. Earlier this week, they downgraded a bunch of Spanish and Danish banks that are sitting on piles of crappy loans. Then, of course, there was Greece.

But just like Washington, the agency is missing the main reason for the recent upshot in debt. There’s a bar chart on the White House website that cites an extra $3.6 trillion of debt created during the Obama administration which is labeled for "economic and technical changes." That figure doesn’t include the $800 billion of stimulus money delineated separately, which is more deserving of that moniker.

Banks concocted $14 trillion of toxic assets that S&P rated AAA between 2003 and 2008.

Jin Lee / AP Photo

But it’s not like the GOP, in particular its Tea Party wing, screamed once about that $3.6 trillion figure during the latest capitol cacophony. Instead, the Treasury Department made up a name for Wall Street subsidies, and Congress went along. And until this spring, when the debt cap debate geared up a notch, S&P was pretty mum about this debt and exactly why it was created.

Recall, banks concocted $14 trillion of toxic assets that S&P rated AAA between 2003 and 2008—or higher in credit worthiness than it now deems the U.S. government to be. These banks now store $1.6 trillion of excess Treasury debt on reserves at the Fed (vs. about zero before the 2008 crisis) on which interest is being paid. In addition, the Fed holds $900 billion of mortgage related assets for the banks. Plus, about a half of trillion of debt is still backing some of AIG’s blunders, JP Morgan Chase’s takeover of Bear Stearns, the agencies that trade through Wall Street, and other sundries. That pretty much covers the extra debt since 2008—not that S&P mentioned this.

But yes, S&P is right. There is no credible plan coming from Washington to deal with this excess debt, nor is the deflection of the conversation to November fooling anyone, but that’s because there’s been no admission from either party as to why the debt came into being.

The bottom line? In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the U.S. created trillions of dollars of debt to float a financial system that was able to screw the U.S. economy largely because banks were able to obtain stellar ratings for crap assets, which had the effect of propagating them far more quickly through the system than they otherwise would have spread. The global thirst for AAA-rated assets pushed demand for questionable loans to fill them from the top down, as Wall Street raked in fees for creating and selling the assets. Later, banks received cheap loans, debt guarantees, and other financial stimulus from Washington when it all went haywire, ergo debt.

Despite a few congressional hearings on the topic, the rating agencies were never held accountable for their role in the toxic-asset pyramid scheme. Now they are holding the U.S. government accountable. The U.S. government deserves it, not because spending cuts weren’t ironed out, but because Wall Street stimulus wasn’t considered, the job market remains in tatters, and there’s no recovery on the horizon.

Still, the downgrade demonstrates that the U.S. doesn't run the show—the private banks and rating firms that get paid by them, do.

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Nomi Prins is author of It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street (Wiley, September, 2009). Before becoming a journalist, she worked on Wall Street as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, and running the international analytics group at Bear Stearns in London.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Debt Crisis Epitomizes America in Decline

America in Decline

Friday 5 August 2011

by: Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Op-Ed

(Photo: The U.S. Army / Flickr)

“It is a common theme” that the United States, which “only a few years ago was hailed to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal is in decline, ominously facing the prospect of its final decay,” Giacomo Chiozza writes in the current Political Science Quarterly.

The theme is indeed widely believed. And with some reason, though a number of qualifications are in order. To start with, the decline has proceeded since the high point of U.S. power after World War II, and the remarkable triumphalism of the post-Gulf War '90s was mostly self-delusion.

Another common theme, at least among those who are not willfully blind, is that American decline is in no small measure self-inflicted. The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country and bewilders the world, may have no analogue in the annals of parliamentary democracy.

The spectacle is even coming to frighten the sponsors of the charade. Corporate power is now concerned that the extremists they helped put in office may in fact bring down the edifice on which their own wealth and privilege relies, the powerful nanny state that caters to their interests.

Corporate power’s ascendancy over politics and society – by now mostly financial – has reached the point that both political organizations, which at this stage barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.

For the public, the primary domestic concern is unemployment. Under current circumstances, that crisis can be overcome only by a significant government stimulus, well beyond the recent one, which barely matched decline in state and local spending – though even that limited initiative probably saved millions of jobs.

For financial institutions the primary concern is the deficit. Therefore, only the deficit is under discussion. A large majority of the population favor addressing the deficit by taxing the very rich (72 percent, 27 percent opposed), reports a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Cutting health programs is opposed by overwhelming majorities (69 percent Medicaid, 78 percent Medicare). The likely outcome is therefore the opposite.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes surveyed how the public would eliminate the deficit. PIPA director Steven Kull writes, “Clearly both the administration and the Republican-led House (of Representatives) are out of step with the public’s values and priorities in regard to the budget.”

The survey illustrates the deep divide: “The biggest difference in spending is that the public favored deep cuts in defense spending, while the administration and the House propose modest increases. The public also favored more spending on job training, education and pollution control than did either the administration or the House.”

The final “compromise” – more accurately, capitulation to the far right – is the opposite throughout, and is almost certain to lead to slower growth and long-term harm to all but the rich and the corporations, which are enjoying record profits.

Not even discussed is that the deficit would be eliminated if, as economist Dean Baker has shown, the dysfunctional privatized health care system in the U.S. were replaced by one similar to other industrial societies’, which have half the per capita costs and health outcomes that are comparable or better.

The financial institutions and Big Pharma are far too powerful for such options even to be considered, though the thought seems hardly Utopian. Off the agenda for similar reasons are other economically sensible options, such as a small financial transactions tax.

Meanwhile new gifts are regularly lavished on Wall Street. The House Appropriations Committee cut the budget request for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the prime barrier against financial fraud. The Consumer Protection Agency is unlikely to survive intact.

Congress wields other weapons in its battle against future generations. Faced with Republican opposition to environmental protection, American Electric Power, a major utility, shelved “the nation’s most prominent effort to capture carbon dioxide from an existing coal-burning power plant, dealing a severe blow to efforts to rein in emissions responsible for global warming,” The New York Times reported.

The self-inflicted blows, while increasingly powerful, are not a recent innovation. They trace back to the 1970s, when the national political economy underwent major transformations, ending what is commonly called “the Golden Age” of (state) capitalism.

Two major elements were financialization (the shift of investor preference from industrial production to so-called FIRE: finance, insurance, real estate) and the offshoring of production. The ideological triumph of “free market doctrines,” highly selective as always, administered further blows, as they were translated into deregulation, rules of corporate governance linking huge CEO rewards to short-term profit, and other such policy decisions.

The resulting concentration of wealth yielded greater political power, accelerating a vicious cycle that has led to extraordinary wealth for a fraction of 1 percent of the population, mainly CEOs of major corporations, hedge fund managers and the like, while for the large majority real incomes have virtually stagnated.

In parallel, the cost of elections skyrocketed, driving both parties even deeper into corporate pockets. What remains of political democracy has been undermined further as both parties have turned to auctioning congressional leadership positions, as political economist Thomas Ferguson outlines in the Financial Times.

“The major political parties borrowed a practice from big box retailers like Walmart, Best Buy or Target,” Ferguson writes. “Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, U.S. congressional parties now post prices for key slots in the lawmaking process.” The legislators who contribute the most funds to the party get the posts.

The result, according to Ferguson, is that debates “rely heavily on the endless repetition of a handful of slogans that have been battle-tested for their appeal to national investor blocs and interest groups that the leadership relies on for resources.” The country be damned.

Before the 2007 crash for which they were largely responsible, the new post-Golden Age financial institutions had gained startling economic power, more than tripling their share of corporate profits. After the crash, a number of economists began to inquire into their function in purely economic terms. Nobel laureate Robert Solow concludes that their general impact may be negative: “The successes probably add little or nothing to the efficiency of the real economy, while the disasters transfer wealth from taxpayers to financiers.”

By shredding the remnants of political democracy, the financial institutions lay the basis for carrying the lethal process forward – as long as their victims are willing to suffer in silence.

(Noam Chomsky’s most recent book is ''9-11: Tenth Anniversary.'' Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.)

© 2011 Noam Chomsky

Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

Truthout has licensed this content. It may not be reproduced by any other source and is not covered by our Creative Commons license.

Noam Chomsky’s most recent book, with co-author Ilan Pappe, is "Gaza in Crisis." Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

The Corporatocracy Systematically Destroying the American Middle Class

My Budget 360

The Corporatocracy Systematically Destroying the American Middle Class: In 40 Years the Corporatocracy has Shifted Americans from a Sustainable Middle Class to a Perpetual Cycle of Debt Serfdom.

The biggest scam of the century is making a full conclusion with this deep recession. What made America the envy of the entire world, a strong and vibrant middle class, is being quickly dismantled so the new order of corporate raiders can siphon off life support from the productive economy. Nothing highlights this grand robbery more so than the current situation of our country. For eight straight months foreclosure filings have hit 300,000 or more yet banks on Wall Street are gearing up for record yearend bonuses for a job well done. The average American is seeing the culmination of 40 years of systematic leeching by the corporatocracy that culminated in the largest transfer of wealth in modern history. A bloodless coup that cemented the true nature of our current economic system.

People wonder why I focus so much on the middle class of America. This is what has been the fundamental difference between our country and other economic systems. A vibrant middle class that provided adequate housing, a decent education, and a road to sustainable wealth. This was built on the backs of a productive economy. But over the last 40 years we have seen much of the true wealth shift to Wall Street and the financial sector and that has largely eroded the value of what it means to be middle class. The new system is designed for the few and by the few. The new financial regulation being touted as the most sweeping since the Great Depression is woefully weak. Yet this is merely a reflection of the power of the corporatocracy. We really have the best government money can buy.

Critics always point to the rising household wages since the 1970s. Yet there is a big problem with this argument since this has occurred with the growth of the two income household:

*Source: Elizabeth Warren

If we factor out men from the data, the average American male is now making $800 less in inflation adjusted terms than his counterpart in 1970. So even though income for households has gone up the data is misleading. Americans now have a harder time keeping the pillars of middle class life intact. If we had to sum it up it would probably be:

-A good home to raise a family

-Access to a good education

-Quality healthcare

-A decent retirement

The above is still accessible but it has become harder to maintain. A solid pension and healthcare used to be provided to workers by companies. That is now gone. Income is only one side of the equation of course. Where do people now spend their money? If we look at the data closely Americans now spend less in clothing, food, and appliances than their 1970s comparison group. This has much to do with cheap goods from abroad and more competition globally. So this is good right? It is but these are more of the smaller line item purchases that Americans make. The biggest purchases include housing and this is a cost that has gone up exponentially:

Housing has gone up 100% in terms of cost for the typical family. Health insurance is now up 103%. Childcare, a more daily need for two income households, has gone up as well since Americans many times need two incomes merely to break into the more elusive middle class. The items that have fallen are largely adjustable and elastic substitutes. For example, you can have macaroni and cheese instead of a steak. Everyone needs shelter whether they buy or rent.

The gigantic housing bubble has only pushed the tide out further to reveal the disappearing middle class. If we break down the data further from a study examining the middle class we find that fixed costs are now through the roof. What is more troubling is that even with two incomes, the ability to sustain a middle class lifestyle has actually gone backwards:

Source: Rortybomb

There is also more volatility on income security. Wall Street and the corporatocracy are running the biggest hypocrisy show in the world. Middle class families are having to adjust to the new economic reality by filing for bankruptcies, losing homes in foreclosure, and getting gouged with credit cards. Yet banks and Wall Street have not cut back and have gone the opposite direction by giving out record bonuses to their small circle of cronies. The bailouts were a large protection of the entrenched corporatocracy.

The biggest scam of the century revolves around the massive growth in debt. Let us chart this back to the 1970s:

The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve disconnected the U.S. dollar from any semblance of reality back in the 1970s. Since that time, Americans have been put into a sleepwalking state where they were drunk on debt induced spending while slowly and surely our manufacturing base was removed from the country. The above chart hit a climax when household debt actually surpassed annual GDP in this decade. In other words, we spent way more than we earned and nothing that operates under that system can survive for any length of time.

This has infuriated many since they thought they were part of the new economy but in reality, they were merely treading water until Wall Street and the banks had to hunker down and protect their small inner circle. Why else is the stock market up 60 percent since the March lows? Let us look at some data since March and see how well Americans have been doing:

March 2009 unemployment rate: 8.5%

December 2009 unemployment rate: 10%

The unemployment rate shot up from 8.5% to 10% in this time and consumer credit has been contracting at a record pace. At the same time, banking profits are going sky high. Take a look at some of the big banking names:

The corporatocracy seems to be doing well in this climate even though the middle class American lifestyle is being dismantled piece by painful piece. Not only is this happening but Americans now have a new line item and that is to fund the bail outs. This is happening through more clandestine channels like destroying the value of the U.S. dollar by printing inordinate amounts of money so banks can keep on giving record bonuses. The financial sector is a blood sucking vampire that is draining the real economy of its life. Why do we even need it at the current size? All mortgages are now backed by the U.S. government through the GSEs or FHA insured loans. Credit card debt and access is shrinking. Banks have curtailed lending to small business. What is the financial sector doing to justify their current profits? Pure and simple speculation on the taxpayer dime. This isn’t capitalism as Adam Smith envisioned. This is a system called a corporatocracy where the main goal is protecting the too big to fail and allowing everyone else to fail.

The average American has every right to be furious at what is occurring. The next generation might have it worse than the last. Not since the Great Depression has this occurred. Some might say that this was destined to happen. That is the storyline the corporatocracy would want you to believe so popular anger can be quelled. Yet this was a deliberate stealing from the American people. Many of these Wall Street elites have no allegiance to the country. They put money in secured tax havens in other countries and hide their money in multiple places avoiding taxes from a country that allows them to run their scam. They have allegiance to only one and that is money. They don’t care about the productive economy of the U.S. Lobbying with their fleet of lawyers is simply another business expense. And here we are, 40 years later with a disappearing middle class, booming financial stocks, millions of foreclosures, and weak financial regulation. Nothing can be clearer than where the power has shifted.

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TAGS: banking, corporate power, Finance, middle class, wall street, wealth

Black Ops for Major U.S. Banks and Corporations

The Development of "Privacy Killing Technologies": A Link to the Murdoch Scandal?

Black Ops for Major U.S. Banks and Corporations

by Tom Burghardt

Global Research, July 25, 2011
Antifascist Calling

Following revelations earlier this year by The Tech Herald that security firms with close ties to the Pentagon ran black ops for major U.S. banks and corporations, it became clear that proprietary software developed for the military and U.S. intelligence was being used to target Americans.

Those firms, including now-defunct HBGary Federal, parent company HBGary, Palantir (a start-up flush with cash from the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel) and Berico Technologies had partnered-up with the Bank of America's law firm Hunton & Williams and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and devised a sub rosa plan of attack against WikiLeaks and Chamber critics.

And when the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous published some 70,000 emails and documents filched from HBGary servers, it was off to the races.

In the intervening months since that story first broke, journalists and researchers have turned their attention to a dark web of security firms developing surveillance software for law enforcement, the Pentagon, and repressive foreign governments.

Last week, Wired revealed that one such firm, TruePosition, "a holding of the Liberty Media giant that owns Sirius XM and the Atlanta Braves," is marketing "something it calls 'location intelligence,' or LOCINT, to intelligence and law enforcement agencies," investigative journalist Spencer Ackerman disclosed.

The Pennsylvania-based company has sold their location services system to NSA surveillance partner AT&T and T-Mobile, allowing those carriers to pinpoint "over 60 million 911 calls annually."

"For the better part of decade," Ackerman writes, "TruePosition has had contracts to provide E-911 services with AT&T (signed originally with Cingular in 2001, which AT&T acquired) and T-Mobile (2003)."

Known as "geofencing," the firm explains that location tech "collects, analyzes, stores and displays real-time and historical wireless events and locations of targeted mobile users."

Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported that amongst the services TruePosition offers clients are "products for safety and security applications, including family monitoring, personal medical alert, emergency number service, and criminal tracking."

Additionally, BusinessWeek reports, the company tailors its "enterprise applications" to corporations interested in "workforce management, asset tracking, and location-based advertising; consumer applications, including local search, traffic, and navigation."

But what should concern readers is the firm's "government applications" market which includes everything from "homeland security" and "military intelligence" to "force tracking."

According to a press release posted on the firm's web site, the "TruePosition Location Intelligence Management System (LIMS)" is a "a multi-dimensional database, which uses probes within mobile networks to capture and store all mobile phone network events--including the time and the location of events. Mobile phone events are items like calls made and received, text messages sent and received, a phone powered on and off, and other rich mobile phone intelligence."

Deploying technology dubbed Uplink Time Difference of Arrival (U-TDOA), the system, installed on cell phone towers, identifies a phone's approximate location--within 30 meters--even if the handset isn't equipped with GPS.

Undoubtedly the system can save lives. "In one case," Ackerman reports, "a corrections officer ... was abducted by a recent parolee. But because her cellphone was turned on and her carrier used TruePosition's location tech, police were able to locate the phone along a Kentucky highway. They set up a roadblock, freed the officer and arrested her captor."

All well and good. However, in the hands of repressive governments or privacy-invading corporations, say Rupert Murdoch's media empire, there just might be far different outcomes.

A Link to the Murdoch Scandal?

The relevance of location intelligence in general and more pointedly, TruePosition's LIMS cellphone surveillance products which may, or may not, have been sold to London's Metropolitan Police and what role they may have played in the Murdoch News of the World (NoW) phone hacking scandal have not been explored by corporate media.

While the "who, what, where" aspects of the scandal are now coming sharply into focus, the "how," that is, the high-tech wizardry behind invasive privacy breaches, and which firms developed and profited from their sale, have been ignored.

Such questions, and related business entanglements, should be of interest to investigators on both sides of the Atlantic.

After all, TruePosition's parent company, the giant conglomerate Liberty Media currently holds an 18 percent stake in News Corporation.

With corporate tentacles stretching from investments in TimeWarner Cable to Expedia and from QVC to Starz and beyond, Liberty Media is a multi-billion dollar media behemoth with some $10.9 billion in revenue in 2010, according to an SEC filing by the firm.

With deep pockets and political clout in Washington the company is "juiced."

In 2011, Liberty's CEO, John C. Malone, surpassed Ted Turner as the largest private landowner in the United States, controlling some 2.1 million acres according to The New York Times.

Dubbed "Darth Vader" by The Independent, Malone acquired a 20 percent stake in News Corp. back in 2000 and "was one of the main investors who rode to the rescue of Mr Murdoch in the early 1990s when News Corp was on its knees."

The New York Times reported back in 2005 that Malone's firm was "unlikely to unwind its investment in the News Corporation" because he considered "the stake in the News Corporation a long-term investment, meaning that the relationship between him and Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the News Corporation, was not likely to be dissolved any time soon."

After acrimonious mid-decade negotiations that stretched out over two years, the media giants cobbled together a deal in 2006 resulting in a $11 billion asset swap, one that gave Liberty control of the DirectTV Group whilst helping Murdoch "tighten his grip" on News Corp., according to The New York Times.

Interestingly enough during those negotiations, investment banking firms Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase along with the white shoe law firm Hogan & Hartson advised News Corp., while Liberty was represented by Bear Stearns and the Baker Botts law firm, long time Bush family consiglieres.

All this can be chalked-up to an interesting set of coincidences. However, the high stakes involved and the relationships and connections forged over decades, including those amongst players who figured prominently in capitalism's 2008 global economic crisis and Bush family corruption, cannot be ignored.

A Suspicious Death

Last week's suspicious death of former NoW whistleblower Sean Hoare should set alarm bells ringing.

When the scandal broke, it was Hoare who told The New York Times last year that senior editors at NoW and another Murdoch tabloid, The Sun, actively encouraged staff to spy on celebrities and others, including victims of the London terror attacks, British soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq and the murdered teenager Milly Dowler; all in pursuit of "exclusives."

The Guardian reported that Hoare said that "reporters at the NoW were able to use police technology to locate people using their mobile phone signals, in exchange for payments to police officers."

"He said journalists were able to use 'pinging', which measured the distance between a mobile handset and a number of phone masts to pinpoint its location," The Guardian revealed.

Hoare described "how reporters would ask a news desk executive to obtain the location of a target: "Within 15 to 30 minutes someone on the news desk would come back and say 'Right, that's where they are.'"

Quite naturally, this raises the question which "police technology" was used to massage NoW exclusives and which firms made a pretty penny selling their wares to police, allegedly for purposes of "fighting crime" and "counterterrorism"?

It was Hoare after all who told The New York Times just days before his death that when he worked for NoW "pinging cost the paper nearly $500 on each occasion."

According to the Times, Hoare found out how the practice worked "when he was scrambling to find someone and was told that one of the news desk editors, Greg Miskiw, could help."

The Times reports that Miskiw "asked for the person's cellphone number, and returned later with information showing the person's precise location in Scotland."

An unnamed "former Scotland Yard officer" interviewed by the Times said "the individual" who provided confidential information to NoW and other Murdoch holdings "could have been one of a small group entitled to authorize pinging requests," that is a senior counterterrorism officer charged with keeping the British public "safe."

Hoare told the Times "the fact that it was a police officer was clear from his exchange with Mr. Miskiw."

"'I thought it was remarkable and asked him how he did it, and he said, 'It's the Old Bill, isn't it?'"

"At that point, you don't ask questions," Hoare said.

Yet despite the relevance of the reporter's death to the scandal, police claimed Hoare's sudden demise was "unexplained but not thought to be suspicious." Really?

As the World Socialist Web Site points out: "The statement is at the very least extraordinary, and at worst sinister in its implications."

Left-wing journalist Chris Marsden wrote that "Hoare is the man who broke silence on the corrupt practices at the News of the World and, most specifically, alleged that former editor Andy Coulson, who later became Prime Minister David Cameron's director of communications, was fully aware of phone hacking that took place on an 'industrial scale'."

Aside from the secret state, what other entities are capable of intercepting phone and other electronic communications on "an industrial scale"? Given Rupert Murdoch's close ties to the political establishment on both sides of the Atlantic, is it a stretch to speculate that a "sympathetic" intelligence service wouldn't do all they could to help a "friend," particularly if cash payments were involved?

How could Hoare's death not be viewed suspiciously?

Indeed, "the morning after Hoare's body was found," Mardsen writes, "former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson and his former deputy, John Yates, were to give evidence before a home affairs select committee. Stephenson had tendered his resignation Sunday and Yates Monday."

Conveniently, for those with much to hide, including police, "the death of Hoare means that his testimony will never be heard by any such inquiry or, more importantly, by any criminal investigation that may arise."

Yet, despite a pending coroner's inquest into the exact cause of the reporter's death, corporate media have rushed to judgement, labeling anyone who raise suspicions as being, what else, "conspiracy theorists."

This despite the fact, as the World Socialist Web Site reported Saturday that information has surfaced "regarding the extent of News International links to known criminals."

Indeed, on July 6 left-wing journalist Robert Stevens reported that "Labour MP Tom Watson told Parliament that News International chief executive and former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks 'was present at a meeting with Scotland Yard when police officers pursuing a murder investigation provided her with evidence that her newspaper was interfering with the pursuit of justice'."

"'She was told of actions by people she paid to expose and discredit David Cook [a Detective Superintendent] and his wife Jackie Haines so that Mr. Cook would be prevented from completing an investigation into a murder'.

"Watson added," Stevens writes, that "'News International was paying people to interfere with police officers and were doing so on behalf of known criminals. We know now that News International had entered the criminal underworld'."

Although Hoare had suffered from years of alcohol and cocaine abuse, he was in rehab and by all accounts on the road to recovery. Hoare could have died from natural causes but this has not yet been established.

Pending histology and toxicology tests which will take weeks, and a coroner's inquest was adjourned July 21 until said test results were in, short of a definitive finding, nothing can nor should be ruled out, including murder, by a party or parties unknown.

While it would be a fatal exercise in rank stupidity for News Corp. to rub out Sean Hoare, would others, including police or organized crime figures caught up in the scandal and known to have been paid by News Corp. "people to interfere with police officers" and to have done so "on behalf of known criminals," have such qualms?

An Open Question

We do not know if TruePosition sold LIMS to London's Metropolitan Police, key players in the Murdoch hacking scandal, and the firm won't say who they sell to.

However, whether they did or did not is a relevant question. That security firms develop and sell privacy-killing products and then wash their hands of responsibility how and by whom their products are used--for good or ill--is hardly irrelevant to victims of police repression or private corruption by entities such as News Corp.

The issue here are the actions taken by our corporate and political minders who believe that everything in terms of smashing down walls between public and private life is up for grabs, a commodity auctioned off to the highest bidder.

While we are told by high-tech firms out to feather their nests and politicians that "law enforcement" require we turn over all our data to police to "keep us safe," the Murdoch scandal reveals precisely that it was police agencies corrupted by giant corporations which had allowed such criminal behavior to go unchecked for years.

And with Congress and Obama Justice Department officials pursuing legislation that will require mobile carriers to store and disclose cell-tower data to police and secret state agencies--all without benefit of a warrant, mind you--as well as encryption back doors built into the internet, we are reaching a point where a perfect storm threatens privacy well into the future, if not permanently.

A Looming Threat

Since LIMS 2008 introduction some 75,000 mobile towers in the U.S. have been equipped with the system, FoxNews, ironically enough, reported two years ago.

That same report informed us that "LOCINT continues to operate in Middle Eastern and Asia-Pacific nations where no legal restrictions exist for tracking cell phone signals."

TruePosition's marketing vice president Dominic Li told Fox "when you establish a geofence, anytime a mobile device enters the territory, our system will be alerted and provide a message to the customer."

Li went on to say, "we realize that this has a lot of value to law enforcement agencies outside of search and rescue missions. It gives rise to a whole host of new solutions for national security."

In keeping with the firm's penchant for secrecy, risk averse when it comes to negative publicity over the civil liberties' implications of their products, "citing security concerns," Fox reported that "company officials declined to specify which countries currently use the technology."

TruePosition claims that while wireless technology "has revolutionized communication" it has a "dark side" as "terrorists and criminals" exploit vulnerabilities to create "serious new threats to the security of nations worldwide."

Touting their ability to combine "location determination and network data mining technologies," TruePosition "offers government agencies, security experts and law enforcement officials powerful, carrier-grade security solutions with the power to defend against criminal and terrorist activity."

Never mind that most of the "serious new threats" to global citizens' rights come from unaccountable state security agencies and international financial cartels responsible for the greatest theft of resources in human history.

For interested parties such as TruePosition, "actionable intelligence" in the form of "data mining to monitor activity and behavior over time in order to build detailed profiles and identify others that they associate with," will somehow, magically one might say, lead to the apprehension of "those who threaten the safety of citizens."

Unasked is the question: who will protect us from those who develop and sell such privacy killing technologies?

Certainly not Congress which has introduced legislation "that would force Internet companies to log data about their customers," CNET News reported earlier this month.

"As a homeland security tool," Wired reported, LIMS is "enticing." Brian Varano, TruePosition's marketing director told Spencer Ackerman to "imagine an 'invisible barrier around sensitive sites like critical infrastructure,' such as oil refineries or power plants."

"The barrier contains a list of known phones belonging to people who work there, allowing them to pass freely through the covered radius. 'If any phone enters that is not on the authorized list, [authorities] are immediately notified,'" Varano told Wired.

While TruePosition's technology may be useful when it comes to protecting nuclear installations and other critical infrastructure from unauthorized breaches and may be an important tool for investigators tracking down drug gangs, human traffickers, kidnappers and stalkers, as we have learned from the Murdoch scandal and the illegal driftnet surveillance of Americans, the potential that governments and private entities will abuse such powerful tools is also likely.

According to Wired while "TruePosition sells to mobile carriers," the company is "cagey about whether the U.S. government uses its products." Abroad however, Ackerman writes, "it sells to governments, which it won't name. Ever since it came out with LOCINT in 2008," Varano said that "'Ministries of Defense and Interior from around the world began beating down our door'."

That technological "quick fixes" such as LOCINT can augment the power of secret state agencies to "easily identify and monitor networks of dissidents," doesn't seem to trouble the firm in the least.

In fact, such concerns don't even enter the equation. As Wired reported, the company "saw a growth market in a field" where such products would have extreme relevance: "the expanding, globalized field of homeland security."

"It really was recession-proof," Varano explained to Ackerman, "because in many parts of the world, the defense and security budgets have either maintained where they were or increased by a large percentage."

Small comfort to victims of globalized surveillance and repression that in many places, including so-called "Western democracies," are already an ubiquitous part of the political landscape.

Consider the ease with which police can deploy LIMS for monitoring dissidents, say anticapitalist activists, union leaders or citizen organizers fighting against the wholesale theft of publicly-owned infrastructure to well-connected corporations (Greece, Ireland or Spain for example) by governments knuckling-under to IMF/ECB demands for so-called "deficit reduction" schemes.

As Stephen Graham points out in his seminal book Cities Under Siege, "as the everyday spaces and systems of urban everyday life are colonized by militarized control technologies" and "notions of policing and war, domestic and foreign, peace and war become less distinct, there emerges a massive boom in a convergent industrial complex encompassing security, surveillance, military technology, prisons, corrections, and electronic entertainment."

"It is no accident," Graham writes, "that security-industrial complexes blossom in parallel with the diffusion of market fundamentalist notions for organizing social, economic and political life."

Creating a climate of fear is key to those who seek to manage daily life. Thus the various media-driven panics surrounding nebulous, open-ended "wars" on "deficits," "drugs," "terror" and now "cyber-crime."

That firms such as TruePosition and hundreds of others who step in to capitalize on the highly-profitable "homeland security" market, hope to continue flying under the radar, we would do well to recall U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who strongly admonished us that "sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Tom Burghardt

The Corporate Education Act Becomes Law

by Luke Hiken / July 28th, 2011

Republican lawmakers were ecstatic today to announce passage of the Corporate Education Act (CEA). The President expressed his support for the Act because the Republican sides of both the House and the Senate had backed it, and that meant it was certainly good enough for Obama. Democrats went along with the Act because they didn’t want to lose the potential financial support of the corporations that would benefit from the CEA.

The first order of business after the passage of the CEA will be to close all of the existing “liberal arts” colleges in the country. As Senator Boner pointed out, the whole concept of “liberal” is passé, and “art” has nothing to do with good job performance. Instead, the CEA will ensure that all education is geared towards employment with America’s leading corporations, and graduates will have been properly trained and groomed to serve these corporate interests. He chuckled at the thought that “liberal arts” ever had the backing of any patriotic citizens.

The government is determined to set priorities for corporate involvement in educating America’s students: Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop and other major military contractors will, of course, have the first shot at the top students, teaching courses that will assist them in weapons development and military research. There will be a strong emphasis on science and mathematics, and courses of questionable utility, such as English, literature, history, philosophy and education, will be placed on a back burner.

The next range of businesses to receive students, after the military contractors, and their assistants at the Pentagon, will be the Wall Street financiers. Their particular expertise, at teaching students how to squeeze the maximum profits out of American citizens without actually producing anything of value, is seen as a specialized form of economics, and one necessitating Wall Street’s leadership. Of course, hedge fund brokers, mortgage speculators and other financial advisors will work closely with corporations such as Goldman Sachs to ensure that every aspect of U.S. business will receive their quota of graduating students.

After the corporations mentioned above, the next in line will be the insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, and other institutions that have made a profit during the last 6 years in the face of America’s failing economy. It was felt that anyone who could make a profit in the current political environment deserved unlimited support.

The CEA was drafted so as to provide public funding for the education that students will receive in order to work for the corporations that will run the academic senates of the universities. After all, private corporations should not be burdened with the need to pay for the education of students who will work for them in later life. Since an educated work force is a prerequisite to the success of any corporation, it is obvious that the public should bear the burden of making sure the CEA functions efficiently.

Democratic leaders explained that several concerns will be met through passage of the CEA: It will get rid of those students who cannot compete in the corporate environment, and will therefore likely become a financial burden on the society. Scholarships will also be unnecessary, since students will be assured jobs at the corporations that sponsored and educated them, and the initial costs of their education will be borne by the public. Finally, by making sure that all future graduates will be assured employment with one of the corporations that run the system, the public will save billions of dollars by not having to educate worthless, stupid youth, who can’t compete in the corporate world.

Because most children don’t know what they want to be when they grow up, and certainly, under the older system, had no idea where they would find employment, the Congress determined that it was a waste of time and money to teach such children until they were older, and had a better sense of direction. By obviating the need for special education, scholarship programs, or “affirmative action,” the Congress was able to drastically lower the amount of funds and resources needed for what used to constitute widespread, wasteful education.

The teaching workforce will also be affected positively. Since the corporations and businesses who will train and educate the students are in the best position to know what courses and curriculum will best suit their needs, the kind of wasted efforts on language skills, history, philosophy and other abstract, impractical classes that characterized the old university systems, can be modified to delete such unwarranted “luxuries.”

Another positive impact that the CEA will have is to end those pesky teacher’s unions, and support systems that existed under the old educational system. Since the targeted corporations will determine teachers and curriculum, most teachers will already be covered by corporate employment contracts, and therefore no other superfluous union-type of structure will be necessary, or desirable.

When Hillary Clinton heard of the CEA, she was extremely pleased, and promised to bring the same formula to the State Department, as a means of streamlining the educational system, and getting rid of the “dead weight” that existed pre-Obama.

Luke Hiken is an attorney who has engaged in the practice of criminal, immigration, and appellate law. Read other articles by Luke, or visit Luke's website.

This article was posted on Thursday, July 28th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Corporate Globalization, Education, Satire, Students.

POLITICO

Regulators, industry cozy up at conferences

Regulators like CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler frequently keynote industry conferences. | AP Photo Close

By LAURA HAUTALA | 7/10/11 9:38 PM EDT

Want to talk to a Dodd-Frank rule writer? Try Las Vegas.

Traveling to glitzy locales to meet with regulators responsible for ironing out the details of the new financial regulation law has been a tactic for bankers and traders hoping to persuade regulators to keep bank capital requirements low, to lessen position limits on trading derivatives and to shield commodity-buying businesses from new swap rules — the next targets on the banking industry’s hit list.

Attendance at conferences put on for participants in commodities markets has shot up this year, a leader in the commodities world said, as regulators zigzag across the country on their agencies’ dime giving speeches on key rules and mingling with attendees over hors d’oeuvres and cocktails.

“There’s absolutely no question that the industry groups have more access [to regulators], partly because they put on more events,” said Ed Mierzwinski, director of the consumer program at U.S. PIRG, a consumer advocacy group.

Many observers said the conference mingling is just business as usual, even a necessary part of the regulation process, but consumer advocates fear the chummy relationship between the regulators and industry puts the interests of the Average Joe at a significant disadvantage since there are no beach-side conferences for the upside-down mortgage holder or the bruised-401(k) retiree.

“The sheer number of opportunities and the sheer level of outreach that can be funded by the industry can lead to a situation where the regulators spend most of the time paying attention to input of the regulated industries,” said Marcus Stanley from Americans for Financial Reform.

For key regulators, like those from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trade Commission, conferences are an opportunity to talk about the rules they’re considering. Since Dodd-Frank passed last year, CFTC regulators have traveled to at least 30 conferences sponsored by trade groups in places like Tokyo and Boca Raton, Fla., according to a review by POLITICO.

Industry groups said the conferences are just part of how work gets done in the regulatory world.

Speakers such as CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler frequently keynote the events, speaking on topics such as commodities clearinghouses, regulating swaps dealers and reducing interconnectedness between financial institutions — all key areas the industry hopes to influence.

“They speak, but they also sit and listen to other panels, and they learn,” said John Damgard, president of the Futures Industry Association, a trade organization for businesses in the commodities market.

“We’ve seen a much larger audience. In Boca, we’ve seen a lot of people who were involved historically in the [over-the-counter] world.” Damgard said. “There’s an awful lot of angst across the spectrum. It’s important to get this right, not just get it done on time.”

Rules made by the CFTC will regulate how the private sector can trade security-backed swaps, the financial instruments sold in a Wild West market that economists blame for the financial crash of 2008. As regulators look to commodities exchanges as a model for regulating these swaps, industry insiders have voiced concerns.

One proposed rule would set position limits, controlling how big a share of commodities markets an individual or financial institution can hold at one time. Many traders don’t see the rule as viable in a global commodities market and want to ensure regulators see their point of view.

“Position limits are not a part of the solution to make sure that markets aren’t manipulated outside the United States,” Damgard said.

What’s more, they point out that these markets include many products besides swaps bought to insure the now infamous mortgage-backed securities.

Damgard, who was the assistant secretary of Agriculture when the CFTC was created in 1974 under the Ford administration and has run the Futures Industry Association since 1982, knows the rule-makers and brought his board together with regulators in a meeting in late June.

“I think I’m the Jack Valenti of trade associations,” Damgard said of his long history at FIA.

Bart Chilton, an outspoken CFTC commissioner, addressed position limits rules at an annual FIA conference, at the Boca Raton Resort and Club, a sprawling hotel with five themed guest areas. Speaking on a panel, Chilton cited study after study that supported position limits.

“As regulators, our job is to ensure that prices are fair, and that’s what I’ll be looking at as we proceed to review our proposed rules on speculative position limits and bona fide hedging,” Chilton told attendees.

Congressional leaders built a lengthy rule-making process into Dodd-Frank, and travel has always been a way for rule-makers to connect with the industries they regulate.

“Regulators have a responsibility to keep the entities they regulate informed of their progress implementing this new law,” Sean Oblack, spokesperson for the Senate Banking Committee, said. “At the same time, it is imperative that these agencies act as responsible stewards of their budgets and make wise decisions with their expenditures.”

Washington observers say the exchange at conferences is healthy.

“It’s actually not a bad thing to have people who have to interact with each other formally have an opportunity to get to know each other,” said Norm Ornstein, a longtime government observer and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. “The fact that that might involve a trip to Las Vegas or Orlando doesn’t trouble me very much.”

Ornstein also told POLITICO there’s nothing improper about a weekend in Vegas, since a regulator can’t expect anonymity out on the strip.

“I’ll tell ya, if you have a regulator [acting badly], you can’t be sure that it’s staying in Vegas,” Ornstein said. “It would be the height of stupidity to behave in a reckless way.”

Bill Black, a former bank regulator, said conferences are not of concern unless the hosts are paying, which a spokesperson from the SEC said is forbidden. Travel records from the CFTC indicate that no trade groups have paid for regulator travel since Dodd-Frank passed.

The CFTC’s Chilton did not accept money from the organizers of the 12th Annual Supply Summit Conference, hosted by the Oil Price Information Service in the Palazzo at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Organizers charged between $12,999 and $13,999 for an exhibitor to claim the display at the conference cocktail reception, which included a cash bar and lobster corn dogs with tarragon aioli for hors d’oeuvres.

Chilton spoke again about position limits, making good use of his casino backdrop in his speech.

“Limits are everywhere, even in a casino, but not much in the world of commodity trading — not yet,” Chilton said in his remarks. “The new Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act instructs us to place limits on the size of speculative positions in the markets we regulate. I think that’s a very good thing and something I’ve favored for some time.”

Black, who said he’s seen employees at private law firms and federal agencies alike be swayed by small gifts, said regulators must be extra careful.

“What we know is that these small things work,” Black said. “You don’t want that feeling of gratitude that is inevitable as human beings.”

But Black said conferences shouldn’t be ruled out.

“Again I don’t see that these raise that [concern] as much, but that’s why you want to be really, really, really careful,” Black said. “Absurdly careful.”