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Today in History

1314   Scottish forces, led by Robert the Bruce, win an overwhelming victory against English King Edward II at the Battle of Bannockburn.  
1340   The English fleet defeats the French fleet at Sluys, off the Flemish coast.  
1497   Explorer John Cabot lands in North America in present-day Canada.  
1509   Henry VIII is crowned King of England. 1664   The colony of New Jersey, named after the Isle of Jersey, is founded.
1647   Margaret Brent, demands a voice and a vote for herself in the Maryland colonial assembly. 1675   King Philip's War begins.  
1812   Napoleon crosses the Nieman River and invades Russia.  
1859   At the Battle of Solferino, also known as the Battle of the Three Sovereigns, the French army, led by Napoleon III, defeats the Austrian army under Franz Joseph I.  
1861   Federal gunboats attack Confederate batteries at Mathias Point, Virginia.  
1862   U.S. intervention saves the British and French at the Dagu forts in China.  
1896   Booker T. Washington becomes the first African American to receive an honorary MA degree from Harvard University.  
1910   The Japanese army invades Korea.  
1913   Greece and Serbia annul their alliance with Bulgaria following border disputes over Macedonia and Thrace.  
1931   The Soviet Union and Afghanistan sign a treaty of neutrality.  
1940   France signs an armistice with Italy.
1941   President Franklin Roosevelt pledges all possible support to the Soviet Union.
 1943   Royal Air Force Bombers hammer Muelheim, Germany, in a drive to cripple the Ruhr industrial base.  
1948   The Soviet Union begins the Berlin Blockade, America responds with the Berlin Airlift.  
1953   John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier announce their engagement.  
1955   Soviet MIG's down a U.S. Navy patrol plane over the Bering Strait.  
1964   The Federal Trade Commission announces that, starting in 1965, cigarette makers must include warning labels about the harmful effects of smoking.  
1970   The U.S. Senate votes overwhelmingly to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

Non Sequitur

Storm doesn't halt Brooklyn's strutting mermaids

by Karen Matthews  

Coney Island nearly went the way of Atlantis when Superstorm Sandy swept up the East Coast last fall, but even that couldn't stop Brooklyn's strutting mermaids from hitting the boardwalk on the first weekend of summer.

Hundreds of thousands of people mobbed the seaside amusement district Saturday for the spectacle of outlandish floats, wacky costumes and bare skin that is Coney Island's annual Mermaid Parade.

Billed as the world's largest art parade, the nautical-themed procession along the boardwalk and nearby Surf Avenue almost didn't happen this year.

Coney Island was hit hard by Sandy. Hundreds of homes and businesses flooded. One major attraction, the state aquarium, was badly damaged. The offices of Coney Island USA, the organization that hosts the parade, were inundated, too.

But the beach's famous boardwalk was one of the few on the coast that was spared. Most of the carnival rides, including the historic Cyclone roller coaster, have reopened. Parade founder Dick Zigun turned to Kickstarter and raised more than $100,000 so the show would go on.
Renae Johnson, a 31-year-old art therapist from Manhattan who arrived wearing a seashell bikini top, fishtail skirt and white makeup, said she wouldn't have missed this year's parade for the world.
"I'm not a religious person, so this tends to be my Christmas," she said.

For Seena Ghaznavi, it felt like the storm never happened.

"From the energy, you would not be able to tell that Sandy came through here," said Ghaznavi, 29, who came as a genie in a turban and harem pants.
The parade, which began in 1983 and takes place on the Saturday closest to the first day of summer, is a mix of seedy, raunchy and family fun. This year's version featured dancers, bands, square politicians, people costumed as pirates, octopuses and sailors, and many women wearing fake fish tails on their bottoms and nothing but sequined pasties — or less — on top.

Each year the parade is presided over by a ceremonial "King Neptune" and "Queen Mermaid." This year's king was 30 Rock actor Judah Friedlander. The Queen Mermaid was journalist and "Real Housewives of New York City" star Carole Radziwill.

Ernest Mitchell, who works at a hardware store a block from the parade route, said the parade is a much needed morale booster after a tough year.
"Everybody is looking forward to the weather being nice and people coming back to Coney Island," he said. "It's not like it used to be, but we're happy the parade's still going on and people may come back for the summer and visit the rides."

The truth is ...

Did you know ...

That a McDonald's worker sues: don't pay by debit card

About the 20 most dangerous wingnuts and their organizations

Are meteorologists shedding their reputations as climate deniers?

That there are fewer states with waiting periods for abortions than there are for guns

There's a New Fascism on the Rise, and the NSA Leaks Show Us What It Looks Like

by John Pilger

The power of truth-tellers like Edward Snowden is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully constructed by the corporate cinema, the corporate academy and the corporate media.

 

In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Edward Bernays wrote: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
The American nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays invented the term "public relations" as a euphemism for state propaganda. He warned that an enduring threat to the invisible government was the truth-teller and an enlightened public.
In 1971, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked US government files known as The Pentagon Papers, revealing that the invasion of Vietnam was based on systematic lying. Four years later, Frank Church conducted sensational hearings in the US Senate: one of the last flickers of American democracy. These laid bare the full extent of the invisible government: the domestic spying and subversion and warmongering by intelligence and "security" agencies and the backing they received from big business and the media, both conservative and liberal.
Speaking about the National Security Agency (NSA), Senator Church said: "I know that the capacity that there is to make tyranny in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law … so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
On 11 June, following the revelations in the Guardian by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg wrote that the US had now "that abyss".
Snowden’s revelation that Washington has used Google, Facebook, Apple and other giants of consumer technology to spy on almost everyone, is further evidence of modern form of fascism – that is the "abyss". Having nurtured old-fashioned fascists around the world – from Latin America to Africa and Indonesia – the genie has risen at home. Understanding this is as important as understanding the criminal abuse of technology.
Fred Branfman, who exposed the "secret" destruction of tiny Laos by the US Air Force in the 1960s and 70s, provides an answer to those who still wonder how a liberal African-American president, a professor of constitutional law, can command such lawlessness. "Under Mr. Obama," he wrote for AlterNet, "no president has done more to create the infrastructure for a possible future police state." Why? Because Obama, like the shrub, understands that his role is not to indulge those who voted for him but to expand "the most powerful institution in the history of the world, one that has killed, wounded or made homeless well over 20 million human beings, mostly civilians, since 1962."
In the new American cyber-power, only the revolving doors have changed. The director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, was adviser to Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state in the shrub junta who lied that Saddam Hussein could attack the US with nuclear weapons. Cohen and Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt – they met in the ruins of Iraq – have co-authored a book, The New Digital Age, endorsed as visionary by the former CIA director Michael Hayden and the war criminals Henry Kissinger and Tony Blair. The authors make no mention of the Prism spying program, revealed by Edward Snowden, that provides the NSA access to all of us who use Google.
Control and dominance are the two words that make sense of this. These are exercised by political, economic and military designs, of which mass surveillance is an essential part, but also by insinuating propaganda in the public consciousness. This was Edward Bernays’s point. His two most successful PR campaigns were convincing Americans they should go to war in 1917 and persuading women to smoke in public; cigarettes were "torches of freedom" that would hasten women’s liberation.
It is in popular culture that the fraudulent "ideal" of America as morally superior, a "leader of the free world", has been most effective. Yet, even during Hollywood’s most jingoistic periods there were exceptional films, like those of the exile Stanley Kubrick, and adventurous European films would have US distributors. These days, there is no Kubrick, no Strangelove, and the US market is almost closed to foreign films.
When I showed my own film, The War on Democracy, to a major, liberally-minded US distributor, I was handed a laundry list of changes required, to "ensure the movie is acceptable". His memorable sop to me was: "OK, maybe we could drop in Sean Penn as narrator. Would that satisfy you?" Lately, Katherine Bigelow’s torture-apologizing Zero Dark Thirtyand Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets, a cinematic hatchet job on Julian Assange, were made with generous backing by Universal Studios, whose parent company until recently was General Electric. GE manufactures weapons, components for fighter aircraft and advance surveillance technology. The company also has lucrative interests in "liberated" Iraq.
The power of truth-tellers like Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully constructed by the corporate cinema, the corporate academy and the corporate media. WikiLeaks is especially dangerous because it provides truth-tellers with a means to get the truth out. This was achieved by Collateral Damage, the cockpit video of an US Apache helicopter allegedly leaked by Bradley Manning. The impact of this one video marked Manning and Assange for state vengeance. Here were US airmen murdering journalists and maiming children in a Baghdad street, clearly enjoying it, and describing their atrocity as "nice". Yet, in one vital sense, they did not get away with it; we are witnesses now, and the rest is up to us.

Citizens Without Obligations?

by Mike Alberti

If American corporations are, as the Supreme Court ruled in 2010, citizens entitled to free speech and other rights from the nation, what corresponding obligations to the nation do these corporations have?
“For individuals, we’ve always thought that citizenship entails a balance of rights and responsibilities,” said James Post, the co-author of “Corporate Responsibility: The American Story” and a professor of management at Boston University. “Does it still mean the same thing for corporations?”
In an effort to find out whether American corporations are the kind of “citizens” that believe that they have national obligations, Remapping Debate contacted the representatives of more than 80 corporations. Most had no comment, a striking finding in and of itself.
And among the corporate representatives who did comment, most were unwilling to say that their corporation had any obligations to the United States, let alone to define any such obligations with specificity. Moreover, representatives of some American multinationals said that their companies do not even identify themselves as being American in any sense except that they are legally incorporated and physically headquartered in one of the states of the U.S.
This has not always been the case. According to numerous experts, the managers of American companies used to feel strong national and social ties (see box titled “When obligations went with benefits”). The disintegration of that sense of obligation raises crucial questions for policy makers as to whether and how to reinforce those ties, and as to what special privileges, if any, should continue to be offered to corporations that are nominally “American.”
According to Post, the question of whether American multinational corporations have national obligations, and if so, what those obligations are, is “one of the most central and least recognized public policy questions of our time.”
All American?
Remapping Debate reached out to corporations of various sizes in a range of sectors, from huge, iconic multinationals like General Motors and Boeing to smaller, primarily domestic companies like JetBlue and RadioShack.
The majority of the fifteen corporate representatives that responded said that their companies did consider themselves to be American.
“I think that most of RadioShack’s 30,000 employees would say that it is an American company,” said Kirk Brewer, head of corporate communications at RadioShack. “The brand has been part of the American landscape for a long time, and the roots of today’s company stretch back more than 90 years.”
When obligations went with benefits For the vast majority of their history, American corporations were perceived by both the public and by corporate executives themselves as having a broad range of obligations — including national obligations — that competed with the goals of making profit or creating value for shareholders.
“The idea that a corporation exists solely to make money is actually quite new,” explained Ralph Gomory, a professor of management at New York University. The broader sense of corporate responsibility was starkly apparent during World War II, when many U.S. companies dramatically changed their operations to aid the war effort, Gomory said, but it also extended through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. “Even in the early ’80s, you would be more likely to hear a CEO talking about his responsibilities to the country or to his employees than his duty to the shareholders.”
In practice, that broader sense of corporate obligation translated to self-imposed restraints on the way that companies interacted with their communities and with their workers, said William Lazonick, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
“For example, up until the 1980s, CEOs were extremely reluctant to shut down factories and lay off a large number of workers,” Lazonick said. “Mass layoffs were actually seen as a serious abnegation of corporate responsibility. It was understood that the company had a responsibility to it workers, and that if it failed, society at large would be on the hook for that failure.”
Margaret Blair, a professor of law at Vanderbilt University, added that the connection between American companies and the nation as a whole was felt strongly by corporate CEOs, who “saw the corporate sector as one of the major forces that was working in the best interests of the country.”
Blair pointed out that in the period from World War II to the 1980s, it was far less common to see corporate executives lobbying the government for special rights and benefits, including lower taxes. “It was accepted that, if the United States was going to be a powerful economy and have a high quality of living, then the corporate sector needed to do its part to supply financial resources to the government,” she said. “There was no sense of it being the corporations versus the government. It was much more about everybody being in it together.”
“There’s no doubt that we’re a global company,” said John Dern, vice president for public relations at Boeing. “but we are first and foremost an American company. We have deep roots in American history and the American economy, and having an identity as an American company is very important for us.” When asked what it was that made them American, however, most companies did not speak in terms of the permanent bonds between a nation and its citizens. Instead, some spoke of the history of their development, or talked in terms of statistical or legal information about their businesses (sales, employment, location of headquarters, or state of incorporation).
For example, when asked what makes the company American, a representative from Ford cited the fact that it “conduct[s] the vast majority of our research and development, produce[s] more than 2 million vehicles annually, and employ[s] more than 66,000 employees.”
A representative from Whole Foods cited the fact that the company is incorporated in the United States, “does well over 90 percent of [its] total business right here in the U.S.” and that “all of our Executive Team and almost all of our top 100 leaders…were born in the United States.”
National obligations?
When corporate representatives were asked directly whether their companies have national obligations, a few said “yes.”
For example, Greg Martin, the executive director of communications strategy and news operations at General Motors, said that GM does have “obligations to the country that go above and beyond our obligation to our shareholders.”
Brewer of RadioShack said that while “[i]t’s hard to imagine what RadioShack might do to act in the national interest…I am pretty sure we would never intentionally act against the national interest.”
Jeff Noel, the vice president for communications and public affairs at Whirlpool, drew the line somewhat differently. Noel said that while the company has “a strong desire to be a responsible citizen,” it does not “have a duty or an obligation” to do so.
Most commonly, companies refused to respond directly to the question.
In an email exchange, for instance, Remapping Debate asked Molly Donahue, a spokesperson for Caterpillar, whether the company considers itself to be American.
“We are an American company that also operates globally,” she responded.
When Remapping Debate followed up by asking whether being American means that Caterpillar has any particular obligations to the United States, Donahue responded that the company had “no additional information to add as it relates to your question.”
Similarly, Allison Steinberg, a spokesperson for JetBlue, cited the company’s efforts to employ veterans as a factor that makes the company American. When asked whether that meant that JetBlue has particular obligations to the United States, however, Steinberg refused to comment further.
Chris Olert, a spokesperson for Consolidated Edison, said that the company does consider itself to be an American company, but when asked whether the company has any national or patriotic duties, he said, “Well, I wouldn’t say that.”
Boeing’s John Dern said that “serving the country and its broad economic interests is important to us,” but “I don’t know if I’d call it in a patriotic way.”
And some companies said that the question did not pertain to them, because they don’t consider themselves to be American at all.
Lynn Brown, vice president of corporate communications at Waste Management, which is incorporated in the United States but also operates in Canada, said that the company considers itself “North American.”
Even some iconic American corporations took a similar line. For example, Courtney Boone, a spokesperson for United States Steel, said that the company does not consider itself to be an American company, but rather “a company with headquarters in the United States and operations globally.”
A shrinking sense of responsibility Beginning in the 1970s, a number of factors combined to begin the erosion of that broader sense of corporate responsibility, Gomory explained. Most prominent among them, he said, were the end of the Cold War and the onset of rapid globalization, an ideological shift in economics and business schools towards the idea that the purpose of a corporation was the maximize shareholder value, and the alignment of the interests of corporate executives with shareholders through stock-based compensation.
In a paper he co-authored on the history of corporate responsibility earlier this year, Gomory cites two statements on corporate responsibility issued by the Business Roundtable.
The first, issued in 1981, maintains that corporations have a responsibility to “each of the corporations constituents.” The statement goes on to say:

Responsibility to all these constituents in toto constitutes responsibility to society…Business and society have a symbiotic relationship: The long term viability of the corporation depends upon its responsibility to the society of which it is a part. And the well-being of society depends upon profitable and responsible business enterprises.

The second statement, issued by the same entity in 1997, illustrates the way that corporate purpose had narrowed: “[T]he principal objective of a business enterprise,” the statement says, “is to generate economic returns to its owners,” that is, its shareholders.
What about the rights and benefits of citizenship?
According to several observers, American corporations, even those with substantial international operations, reap innumerable benefits from being incorporated in the United States and being considered American “citizens.”
“American corporations are benefiting enormously from being thought of as American citizens,” said Richard Sylla, a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University (NYU). “And lots of policy gets made with the goal of helping American businesses, with the assumption that there is some relationship based on mutual obligation.”
Some of those benefits, Sylla said, are very direct and tangible. “You have the full force of American military and diplomatic power backing you up,” he said. “You can’t put a price on that.”
Sylla also mentioned that the Department of Commerce, Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Export-Import Bank “exist only to find ways to give American companies an edge in global markets.”
Other observers cited a variety of other benefits that American corporations receive.
Wayne Ranick, the director of communications for the United Steelworkers, pointed out that American corporations “benefit from the infrastructure that is publicly financed, employees who are trained and educated, and the largest consumer market in the world.”
“There are a lot of benefits that get taken for granted,” said Scott Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “The stability of the U.S. government and the size and reliability of the U.S. economy are great benefits for companies.”
Lynn Stout, a professor of law at Cornell University, said that the U.S. legal system was another great, under-appreciated benefit for American corporations. “In terms of the quality of judges and the speed and efficiency of decision making, we have the most appealing legal system in the world,” she said.
Greg Martin of General Motors acknowledged that the company had benefited very directly from policies such as the government bailout of the automotive companies in 2009, but also less directly from the country’s investment in research and development, skilled domestic workforce, and “the spirit of freedom and aspirational values that permeate American society and make it possible to succeed here.”
But most companies had a more difficult time explaining the benefits they had received. Several companies said that they had benefited most from being perceived abroad as being an American company, which helped them to sell their products in foreign markets. Lynn Brown of Waste Management cited government regulation that made it more difficult to operate municipal landfills, which “essentially allowed the company to come into being.”
According to Richard Sylla of NYU, “it’s revealing that the benefits they cite are so self-serving. It shows that they think of themselves as opportunistic entities, not participatory members of society.”
A fundamental disjunction
Sylla said the fact that many American corporations see themselves as entitled to the benefits of citizenship — without incurring reciprocal obligations — is reflective of a fundamental disjunction between how individual and corporate citizenship are perceived.
“We’ve determined that a corporation is legally like a person in lots of ways,” Sylla said. “They have rights, including the right to free speech, and they enjoy an array of benefits. Don’t most of us think that those rights and benefits come attached to obligations? When they say they don’t have any national obligations, it shows we have a double standard.” William Lazonick, a professor and the director of the Center for Industrial Competitiveness at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, pointed out that not only do many corporations benefit from being considered American citizens, but they also actively use their citizenship to lobby for further benefits.
“When they appear before Congress and say, ‘Unless you do this, America won’t be able to compete,’ they’re basically appealing to some notion of citizenship and the national interest,” Lazonick said. “They’re saying, ‘I’m entitled to something because I’m American.’”
When they then “turn around and say, ‘We don’t have any responsibilities,’” he went on, “that’s the pinnacle of hypocrisy.”
As an example, Lazonick pointed out that Apple has repeatedly lobbied Congress for a tax break that would allow it to bring profits made abroad to the United States at a lower tax rate, and has argued for the break because it would be beneficial for American workers.
But Apple executives have, on other occasions, renounced any national responsibility. “We don’t have an obligation to solve American problems,” one executive told the New York Times in 2012. “Our only obligation is to make the best product possible.”
While Apple declined to comment for this story, representatives of other companies made it clear that they did not want to limit themselves in any way by identifying as American or proclaiming responsibilities to the United States, and that they viewed their nationality in opportunistic terms.
“In some cases, being defined as an American company is what is important,” said Courtney Boone of U.S. Steel. “In some cases, it’s that we operate globally.”
What is to be done?
According to several experts, there is a range of policy options available that could re-insert a greater sense of national obligation in American companies (see box titled “How to re-balance benefits and obligations”).
According to Lynn Stout of Cornell, there are numerous measures that can be taken to change the internal dynamics of individual firms.
“In most companies, everybody is working on the understanding that the company has no obligations except to make money and to follow the law,” she said. “But that hasn’t always been the case, and there are innumerable ways that we can broaden the responsibilities of corporations.”
Ralph Gomory, a research professor at New York University, explained that another set of solutions is external to any specific firm and involves creating a broad economic and legal structure to incentivize firms to act in the national interest.
“There’s no shortage of possible solutions,” Gomory said. “Once we begin to ask why we have different expectations of individual citizens and corporate citizens, the hard part is done.”
How to re-balance benefits and obligations Experts identified a range of measures that could be taken to re-align the goals of American corporations with the country as a whole and broaden the understanding of corporate responsibility to include national obligations.
Some of those options, said Richard Sylla, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, are external to the structure of any individual firm, operating at a more systemic level to shape the actions of corporations.
“One of the goals of corporate executives will always be to make money and create value,” Sylla said, “but we have the power to make sure that they can’t do that if it means working against the national interest.”
One such measure that Sylla advocates is the strategic use of import tariffs to make it less profitable for American companies to manufacture products abroad and then ship them back into the U.S. market. He also suggested offering tax incentives to companies who create a certain percentage of their economic value in the United States.
Other experts suggested measures that would change corporate governance to broaden the purpose of the corporation.
According to William Lazonick of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, the alignment of the interests of corporate executives with shareholders has been one of the most powerful factors contributing to the narrowing of corporate obligation over the last three decades. To change that alignment, Lazonick would push to reduce the use of stock-based compensation and have executive pay reflect performance measures other than share price.
Another way to break the exclusive alignment of executives with shareholders, he said, would be to change the makeup of corporate boards by, for example, requiring that a certain percentage of the board be made up of employees or members of the community. This practice already exists in other countries, notably Germany, where all corporate boards are required to include worker representation.
According to James Post, a professor of management at Boston University, another way of influencing the decision-making of executives would be to change the laws governing the fiduciary duty of pension fund managers to allow them to invest with a greater social purpose.
And Ralph Gomory, a professor at New York University, suggested going even further by explicitly broadening corporate purpose through state incorporation law, making it easier to establish corporate entities with a stated purpose other than maximizing shareholder value. That state purpose could include “creating well-paid jobs for American workers, improving the quality of life in a particular community, or making technological innovations that will benefit the country as a whole,” Gomory said.
Lynn Stout, a professor of law at Cornell University, said that using incorporation law to re-define corporate purpose would make it possible to “impose citizenship obligations on corporations that are incorporated within our borders.”
Exactly what those obligations should be, Stout added, “is something that we as a society need to be having a serious conversation about.”
According to Richard Sylla, however, continuing to operate as though corporations have rights and are entitled to benefits without any attendant duty other than to make profits has profound implications for our political system.
“It begs the question, ‘who are our elected officials there to serve?’” Sylla said. “Is this government of, by and for the people or of, by and for the corporations?”
Some observers, however, believe that if corporations have been acting in a way that’s contrary to the interests of the country, it’s only because policy makers have not extended them enough benefits.
Justin Danhof is the general counsel of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a free market think tank based in Washington, D.C. In an interview with Remapping Debate, Danhof explained that serving any national obligations “is not what corporations are there to do.”
The only goal of corporations, he said, is to make money for their shareholders. While Danhof agreed that companies sometimes act against the national interest, as in the case of mass off-shoring, he said that it is policy makers who bear the blame for that behavior.
“Why would a company offshore?” he asked. “It’s because the environment that’s been created domestically is not conducive to their competitiveness anymore. If they can be more profitable somewhere else, then they have no choice but to go.”
But according to James Post of Boston University, that mentality leads inevitably to “a race to the bottom, in which every country just tries to do everything it can to cater to corporations, regardless of what they’re getting for it.”
In that framework, said William Lazonick of the University of Massachusetts, “governments have effectively ceded decision-making power to the corporations.” (See sidebar titled “What about capital controls?”)
According to Ralph Gomory of NYU, that framework would be considered “intolerable” by most Americans, and yet “our economic system is based on the assumption that the relationship between the United States and corporate American is one of mutual benefit, and that American corporations will work in the national interest.”
The first step in changing that framework, he said, is to abandon that assumption. “Then you have to really step back and ask, ‘What kind of economy do we want to have?’”

A Good One

Cognitive Dissonance

From Mother Jones

Are Wingnuts More Likely Than Liberals to Avoid Cognitive Dissonance?

(Short answer: Yes)

Ever since Stanford psychologist Leon Festinger's pioneering work on doomsday cults in the 1950s, the concept of cognitive dissonance has been well established in psychology and even, to some extent, embedded in public consciousness. Basically, when the mind is faced with an idea that is threatening to one's identity or sense of self-an idea that induces unpleasant dissonance-one tends to try to either avoid the thought or, perhaps, reinterpret it into something unthreatening or positive. Thus, in Festinger's landmark work, a doomsday cult interpreted the failure of the world to end on the precise day they had predicted as evidence that their beliefs were right in the first place!

But do liberals and wingnuts differ in their tendency to avoid cognitive dissonance? Suggestive evidence from past research suggests they might. For instance, a study of voters in the 2000 election by Stanford public opinion specialist Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues found that although repugicans and wingnuts were more interested in learning information about the shrub than about Al Gore, Democratic and liberal voters had no such political preference.

In a recent study in PLOS One, an online academic journal, the psychologist Jay Van Bavel and his colleagues at New York University set out to explicitly test whether conservatives are more likely than liberals to avoid the unsettling sensation of cognitive dissonance. For the experiment, they asked shrub and Barack Obama supporters to write an essay supporting the president whom they had already said they opposed. It was a test, as the study's instructions instructions put it, of "the ability to craft logical arguments arguing positions you may not personally endorse."

Importantly, the study sometimes presented writing the essay as a choice-which is more likely to arouse dissonance-and other times presented it as an assignment. As a control, the participants were put through the same routine by being asked to write essays on a nonpolitical issue: How they felt about Macs vs. PCs.

Sure enough, the results yielded a significant partisan difference in the willingness to write the essay-but only when the essay was political (not about Macs vs. PCs) and only when writing it was presented a choice, not an assignment. In that context, the results were rather stunning: Not a single shrub supporter was willing to write a pro-Obama essay. That's 0 out of 28 shrub supporters overall. Obama supporters didn't like writing pro shrub essays much either, but they were a lot more willing in general: 20 out of 71 did so, or 28 percent overall. (The study sample, obtained through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, contained more liberals than wingnuts.)

In fact, some wingnuts sounded rather miffed after taking the study, leaving comments like: "Not for all the tea in China would I write that." In contrast, note the study authors, some liberals seemed to revel in the assignment. "This was fun!" as one put it.

The repugican De-Evolution

From Political Cabal to Cult

by Allen Clifton  

For a while now, I’ve called the repugican cabal a cult more often than I have a political party or ideology.  The emergence of the tea party only solidified this belief.
Scientific research (not that science means much of anything to many repugicans) distinguishes 5 characteristics of a cult:

1. People are put in physical or emotionally distressing situations
2. Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized
3. They receive what seems to be unconditional love, acceptance and attention from a charismatic leader or group
4. They get a new identity based on the group
5. They are subject to entrapment and their access to information is severely controlled

I’ll tackle these one by one.
1)  Any rational person who’s subjected themselves to a decent amount of right-wing media (I have, it comes with the job) would find it hard to deny that these individuals often thrive on fear, paranoia and anger.  Anyone who has ever objectively watched Faux News, listened to Glenn Beck or Lush Dimbulb, has probably lost count of the references to apocalyptic destruction of our country even in just one broadcast.  Even after the death of Osama Bin Ladin, something that should have been celebrated by every American, Faux News perpetuated the idea that President Obama was someone who proved that he has no issues going into a country without authorization, to kill whoever he wants—whenever he wants.  Really?  You take what should be an apolitical event and turn it into a means at which to paint Obama as some kind of tyrant who will stop at nothing to kill whoever he wants.  It was simply ridiculous.
Even long after the “death panel” myth has been soundly debunked, many repugicans still fear “death panels” in the Affordable Care Act.  They’ve been conditioned to believe Obama is some kind of gay rights supporting, foreign-born, radical muslim socialist set on destroying “traditional American values,” yet can’t pinpoint a time when we had those—for everyone.  Hell, they can’t even comprehend that for someone to be a socialist, a radical muslim and support homosexuality is nearly an endless line of contradictions that no one person could ever singularly encompass.
They’re told by most of their media sources to be afraid.  These bad men are out to bankrupt your grandchildren, create panels deciding who lives and dies, and turn this country into some socialistic style of governing.  You can’t constantly be bombarded with this kind of intensely negative and hate filled information and not come out emotionally compromised.
2)  I’ve always said repugicans are all about simple thoughts and vanilla ideas, I call it bumper sticker politics.  They create catch phrases like “Obamacare” or “job creators” because it’s easier to peddle to their followers.  Their party is essentially based on 3 main ideas: God, taxes and guns.  It’s simple and easy to repeat.
I always say the liberal strengths and weaknesses are the very same things.  Our ability to be diverse and think differently, while still fundamentally agreeing upon an issue, makes liberals more well-rounded.  On the contrast, that same diverse nature makes us seem weaker and far less organized.  The repugicans aren’t this way.  If Faux News or other wingnut media sources push an idea, I’ll almost instantly see repugicans repeating those same exact ideas—practically verbatim.
No matter their argument, be it about taxes, Obama, terrorism, the Constitution—whatever the right-wing media tells them to believe, they will.  Then they’ll repeat them over and over, indoctrinating their audience until it becomes second nature to repeat the exact same response anytime they’re faced with that issue from the opposing side.  Want proof?  Ask a random repugican the real name of “Obamacare.”  Heck, repugicans won’t even say rich or wealthy anymore.  If you are rich or wealthy you’re now a “job creator”—even if you don’t create a single job.
3)  While I wouldn’t call it unconditional love, it is shocking whenever I see Faux, Beck or Lush disagree with anything repugicans are doing.  These outlets make repugicans feel good and justified for their hatred and fear of anything and everything not like them.
They perpetuated the notion that, “While the “liberal media” may bash you, and Democrats may call you ignorant—who cares?.  Those people are the enemy, they tell you what you don’t want to hear.  But if you listen to us, the “fair and balanced” media, we’ll spoon feed you exactly what you do want to hear.  You’re not bad christians!  Sure you may hate homosexuals, call the poor lazy moochers of our welfare system, then cheer executions—but you’re a devout member of your cult!  You volunteer in the choir and tithe 10% of your income each month.  You’re a fantastic christian American—don’t you let anyone tell you otherwise.”
When a gay soldier was booed at a repugican cabal debate, not a single candidate there reprimanded the audience for doing so.  At another debate a hypothetical man without health insurance was presented to Ron Paul in which he concluded let him die, which was cheered by the audience.  This, the cabal who clings to the bible and calls themselves the “moral majority.”  But it was alright, because Faux News said it was.  They perpetuate this idea that “While the rest of the world may be against you, we love you and it’s perfectly acceptable to believe the way you do—they are the enemy, we are your friends.”
4)  The repugicans are no longer a political party.  Not anymore.  It’s a faith, similar to any religion.  The repugicans wear their cabal as proudly as they do their religion.  Ideology should always be up for adjustment or debate.  Facts should be considered the basis for which you build your political system of beliefs.  For many repugicans, they’re born and bred to be a wingnut.  Granted, liberals are this way in a lot of aspects, but liberals are typically more diverse and open to progressive and changing ideas.  The repugicans cling to the same talking points they have for decades.
I am a liberal and I think differently, very differently on a lot of occasions, than many of my liberal friends.  The repugicans aren’t this way.  In fact, if you’re not essentially 100% committed to their ideas from the top to bottom they have a title for you with a nice little acronym to match.  You’re a R.I.N.O. (Repugican In Name Only).  Sure, they’ll accept your vote and support, but do you think gay marriage is acceptable?  Do you think we should raise taxes?  If the answer is yes, then I’m sorry— but you’re not really “one of us.”
Now it’s not just being a repugican, it’s being a “tea party repugican”—which means you’re a “true wingnut,” not just your average wingnut.  You can’t simply have a set of political ideologies, debate them and be diverse.  You have to be the alpha repugican, all or nothing.  Otherwise you’re really not a true repugican.
5) And my favorite.  Access to information is highly controlled.  Currently, the repugican answer to anything is, “If a Faux approved media source didn’t report it, then it is all a part of the liberally bias media, thus a part of the whole conspiracy against the truth.”
I’ve said for a while now, facts have become objective statements.  I can provide links to simple, factual ideas such as Reagan raised taxes 11 times, but most repugicans either don’t care or won’t believe it.  Tell them Reagan (the messiah of “wingnuttery”) quadrupled our deficit and they aren’t even phased.  Many repugicans, especially tea party repugicans, cling to Reagan’s legend as the epitome of repugican values, despite the fact Reagan is closer to being a Democrat than a tea party repugican in today’s wingnut world.
It’s the classic case of trying to argue with a conspiracy theorist.  Essentially you can never win the argument as it’s almost an impossible task.  To someone who buys into a conspiracy, all evidence opposed to that conspiracy is just part of the conspiracy.  That’s how repugicans are right now.  Any economic or political evidence showing the obvious hypocritical and contradicting beliefs they currently value is simply the liberal media trying to push their agenda.
Suddenly global warming is a hoax, homosexuality is a choice, green energy is bad because it requires about 1/1000th the fossil fuels we use today (it still needs oil for lubrication—that one always makes me laugh), Reagan never raised taxes, etc..
Honestly, I could go on and on about the ridiculous statements I’ve heard repugicans make, simply because Faux News and their buddies decided to push that particular agenda
The dogma of “repugican” has turned into a full-fledged cult following.
The next time you talk politics with a repugican ask them to provide you with an example of a strong economic country where the government is weak, taxes are low, and the welfare of the country’s economic future is put into the hands of the rich and powerful—just one historical example.  I already know their answer because there isn’t one.  In fact, the closest resemblance to any nation that has a weak government,  little or no taxes and the powerful are left to do what they wish are Third World countries like Somalia.  That still doesn’t change the fact they believe in the ideology that supports this style of governing.
Or just simply ask them not to tell you what they believe, but provide examples of where it’s worked. The repugicans have mastered the art of repeating their talking points and political rhetoric, but when you ask them to provide actual information on where their ideology has worked, they typically come up lacking any evidence to support their argument.
Ask them not to tell you why you’re wrong, but to prove to you why they’re right.  It can’t be done.

At Their Core Flag Waving repugicans Oppose Democracy and a Free Society

The danger inherent in fundamentalism is it demands an absolutist and strict obedience to a concrete standard, or set of standards, that its ideologue devotees cannot waiver from or comprehend non-compliance from non-adherents. Religion, in its purest form, is steeped in fundamentalism primarily because strict obedience to its particular tenets is required by its adherents who tend toward imposing their beliefs on the rest of society. America’s version of conservatism is a fixed belief system not unlike fundamentalist religion, and regardless the U.S. Constitution, or will of the people, conservatives are ill-inclined to waiver from imposing their ideology on the people. Like religion, wingnuts demand strict obedience from all members of society making it incompatible with democracy or a free society. For the past four-and-a-half years, Americans have been besieged by an axis of fundamentalist groups who exemplify anti-democratic ideology and between corporatists, evangelical fundamentalists, and conservatives, the nation risks drifting toward fascism and if not thwarted spells the end of American democracy.
Although corporatists pose a clear and present danger to America’s representative democracy, it is religious and conservative fundamentalists who openly oppose the idea of a free society, and in their rush to impose their ideology on the entire nation belie their contention they love America or its founding document. The repugicans in Congress have all but brought governance to a halt with their obstructionism and demand that the nation adheres to their fundamentalist agenda or they prevent government from operating, and in conjunction with forcing bible-based laws on the people demonstrate their hatred for democracy. As Americans await a pair of Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage, religious fundamentalists preemptively warned that a decision contrary to their religion will leave them no choice but to defy the Court they claim is “acting beyond its constitutional role and contrary to the Natural Moral Law which transcends religions, culture, and time.” The evangelicals released a letter stating their intent to defy the High Court and ended with a threat; “Make no mistake about our resolve, this is the line we must draw and one we cannot and will not cross,” and it exemplifies the christian-wingnut mindset repugicans are pushing on the people at all levels of government.
At the beginning of the 113^th Congress, Speaker of the House John Boehner promised evangelical fundamentalists that “making abortion a relic of the past” was repugican’s primary goal for 2013, and following through on his word House Republicans passed an unconstitutional ban on abortions after 20 weeks in clear violation of the High Court’s ruling that abortion is a woman’s choice, and legal, until the fetus is viable outside the womb. Fundamentalists could not care less what the Supreme Court ruled and repugicans demonstrated their allegiance is not to the Constitutional authority of the High Court, but to the absolutist standards of fundamentalist christians. In Virginia, the state’s attorney general and candidate for governor, Ken Cuccinelli, is defending an unconstitutional law, “Crimes Against Nature,” because he feels it is his religious right to prohibit oral and anal sex between consenting adults because like opponents of same-sex marriage, he claims it is “contrary to natural moral law” spelled out in the christian bible.
Cuccinelli has a history of demanding Virginia residents adhere to his religious fundamentalist agenda and is the poster-boy for the christian wingnut’s attempt to rule by biblical edict. In 2007, Cuccinelli cosponsored personhood legislation that defined a zygote is a human being and would abolish and criminalize all forms of birth control as tantamount to murder for preventing a zygote from implanting in the womb.  In 1982 the Senate rejected legislation defining human life at fertilization because it automatically defined contraception as an “abortifacient” which is a nice word for zygote killer. In 2010, Cuccinelli sent a memo to the state’s universities informing them they did not need to protect gays from discrimination, and that it would be illegal if they did. He said, “It is my advice that the law prohibits a college or university from including ‘sexual orientation’ as a protected class within its nondiscrimination policy,” and it is based on his “view that homosexual acts are intrinsically wrong. I think in a natural law based country it’s appropriate to have policies that reflect that. They don’t comport with natural law. I happen to think that it represents behavior that is not healthy to society.”
Cuccinelli, like same-sex marriage opponents and wingnuts opposed to social programs, safety nets, taxes on the wealthy and corporations, represents the fundamentalist threat to democracy because they will go to any length to impose their ideology on the people regardless the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court rulings, or the will of the people. For example, repugicans blocked expanded background checks for gun purchases despite 90% of America, including repugicans and NRA members, supported a sensible means of keeping guns out of criminal’s hands. In a January 2013 poll, 70% of Americans supported abortion rights and yet repugicans, at the behest of evangelicals, passed an unconstitutional ban after 20 weeks despite the risk of losing more women voters in the next election.
Democracy is the antithesis of, and protection from, fundamentalism because the idea of one man, one religion, one political ideology, or one religious book being set up as the absolute standard to which all people of a nation are bound will always subject the majority to tyranny. It is true that is the end goal of Christian fundamentalists in America the same as it is the goal of conservatives in the tea party and Republicans pushing libertarianism on America, but it is not democracy and certainly not the Founding Fathers intent. All christians seek to impose their will on all the people, but inherent in all religions is the belief that there is only one way, one law, and one absolute that rejects all others and it is why men like Cuccinelli, wingnut christians in Congress, and same-sex marriage opponents openly threaten to defy the Highest Court in the land because a ruling may be contrary to their “natural moral law” and state categorically that the Supreme Court has no “moral authority” to rule that all Americans are protected under the 14^th Amendment.
Perhaps the religious leaders who threatened there is a “line we cannot and will not cross” are ignorant of the High Court’s duty to the Constitution and the nation because it is not a moral authority; it is a legal and Constitutional authority over the entire nation. Whether the religious fundamentalists like it or not, the Constitution, and not any religious book, is the legal authority in America and that is a line that the great majority of Americans will not tolerate any group crossing regardless of what kind of fundamentalist ideologue they are.

Does the repugican cabal even have principles?

From Daily Inter Lake

By TOM SHAUGHNESSY

Is it really raining scandals in Washington? How is it that when four people are killed in Benghazi, it is a scandal but 4,500 of America's finest killed in the shrub-Cheney neo-con war in Iraq, a war started on lies, that is just fine, no problem?

In 2011 the House repugicans cut $150 million from security for our embassies; in 2012 they cut $300 million more. Did those cuts have anything to do with four Americans being killed? Is that not a scandal? How is Fast and Furious not a scandal when the shrub junta starts it, but it is a scandal when Obama stops it? When the IRS spends $50 million to party, that is a scandal. For the IRS to investigate groups asking for tax-exempt status, that is their job. They should investigate them all.

In a recent hearing Sen. Baucus revealed that in 1959, the Eisenhower administration, the IRS illegally changed the wording of the law on 501(c)4 groups from "exclusively" to "primarily," thus all 501(c)4 groups that have any political action, all the tea party groups complaining to Congress, do not qualify for tax-exempt status. The only scandal would be if they are not all denied.

If there is a scandal in Washington it is that the House Oversight committee under repugican Darrel Issa, which is supposed to investigate government wrongdoing, has been used as a political smear machine to defeat Obama.

When that failed, it is being used to promote a continual string of supposed scandals to try to distract the American people and discredit the Democrats. Isn't the fact that repugican House Speaker Boehner only has the House working less than half the time a scandal? How many taxpayers get to work half time for full pay? Isn't spending 50 million tax dollars to vote 38 times to kill the health-care law a scandal? That's 38 wasted votes on repealing health care and not one vote on a jobs bill that could create jobs like the bypass here in Kalispell. A jobs bill that could rebuild our crumbling bridges.

The truth be told

Criminalizing Students Cripples Their Future and Lines the Pockets of the Corrections Industry

As someone who has worked with youth who have disabilities as part of my career, I was particularly disturbed when I recently came upon the story of a young high school student with Asperger’s syndrome who had been hounded and manipulated by someone he thought was his friend into buying this “friend” marijuana. Youth with disabilities often struggle to make friends. They’re subjected to the taunts of bullies much more often than they are extended the invitation of cliques to join them in the high stakes social gauntlet that is high school. What this article described were the machinations of an undercover cop who basically practiced the timeless art of bullying as he clearly went about his entrapment of his “friend.” Having myself been extended a false invitation to hang out with the “cool crowd” during my awkward youth, only to find it was a trick, I know the sting of being duped by someone who pretends to be your friend. This police officer did the same. At least when I woke up the next day, all I had were bad memories. This child with an autism spectrum disorder had a criminal charge to face. Righteously, his parents are filing suit against the school district for allowing their son to be targeted in his vulnerable position, for attempting to punish him even after a judge more or less let him off, and for the subsequent bullying the boy received from classmates as a result of the whole incident.

The story illustrates two major issues facing our leaders and policy-makers. First, the failed and out-of-control War on Drugs has become so pernicious, its warriors feel the need to ensnare disabled high school kids. There are hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits, but we’re spending our criminal justice dollars on undercover cops ferreting out and entrapping teens? When will our country finally say enough is enough, and end this costly and futile War?

Then, another equally disturbing issue is raised. Why are we criminalizing our youth? The now ubiquitous phrase, “school-to-prison pipeline,” has become part of our lexicon for a reason. Texas is assuring that transition for youth by electronically linking their school records to the criminal courts, so youth who miss school can be immediately prosecuted. Across the country, in story after story, we hear about children, some as young as five, being taken to jail or juvenile detention for misbehavior; misbehavior that in previous decades would have warranted the traditional detention.  Previous victims of the criminalization of students tell stories of being interrogated mercilessly, never being given access to their parents, an attorney, or even being read their rights. There is evidence that schools have very little concern for students’ rights.

Students are punished or even arrested for having too many absences, putting perfume on in class, not following the dress code, not carrying their ID, doodling on their desk, texting on school grounds, etc., with suspensions up to two weeks or even misdemeanor charges sending them to court. Alarmingly, being suspended just once in ninth grade doubles your chances of dropping out of high school (.pdf). Two suspensions and you have a 42% chance of dropping out. With three, there’s about a 50/50 chance, you’ll finish high school. And what of students who are sent to juvenile detention? New research has demonstrated that such facilities themselves are the cause of additional criminal behavior in youth. Economists Anna Aizer and Joseph J. Doyle, Jr. compared Chicago youth who went before judges who opted for juvenile detention more frequently versus those who received more lenient punishments (e.g. home monitoring or community service). Despite having similar profiles in terms of background and offenses, the youth sentenced to detention were 13% less likely to graduate high school and 22% more likely to end up in prison as adults.

Concerned teachers and administrators trace this trend back to the advent of “zero tolerance” policies, originally intended to apply to bringing guns and weapons to school, and now applied to every imaginable offense, including the most petty (.pdf). By no means is the impact racially neutral either. In the 2009-2010 school year, you had a one in fourteen chance of being suspended if you were a white child. If you were a black child, those odds go up to one in four. If you were a disabled child, your odds of suspension were one in five. You can just imagine how likely you would be to end up suspended if you were a black, disabled child. Though he wasn’t in school at the time, the case of Tremaine McMillian, the 14-year old boy, who allegedly gave police officers a “dehumanizing stare,” and thus apparently deserved to be put in a chokehold, demonstrates that African American children in particular are viewed as threatening and criminal.

All of this criminalization of children and youth has led some enlightened teachers/administrators, parents, and now young people, to protest. Members of Detroit Youth Voice, an activist group for the young, protested the school-to-prison pipeline a few months ago by taking their message to the streets and asking the Detroit Public School system to revisit their zero tolerance policies. And they have the backing of the State Board of Education which issued a memorandum stating,

“Researchers have found no evidence that zero tolerance policies make schools safer or improve student behavior. In fact, studies suggest that the overuse of suspensions and expulsions may actually increase the likelihood of later criminal misconduct…Many students who have been suspended or expelled have no alternative opportunities for learning or other productive activities. When students are repeatedly suspended, they are at substantially greater risk of leaving school altogether, and current rates of expulsion and suspension in Michigan public schools are unacceptably high…The Board strongly urges Michigan school districts to take the following action: Review existing zero tolerance policies that are above and beyond those required in law, and limit the number of offenses mandating suspension and referral to law enforcement to those directly related to the safety of students and school personnel. Removing a child from an educational opportunity should be reserved for the most serious infractions, and not used as a means of discipline for minor occurrences…”

It remains to be seen how school districts respond to the Board of Education’s recommendations. Of course, this is evidence of progress in one state. There are still many, many more in drastic need of reform. There is also plenty of room for concern about the trend across the country to close schools in low-income, predominantly minority communities where educational resources are most needed. For example, Philadelphia has just decided to close 23 of its public schools to save money due to budget shortfalls. The irony: they are spending $400 million to build a “state of the art” prison.

Last year, we wrote about the rise of the private prison industry and the dangers of providing perverse incentives to lock people up. One would hope that private companies are not already behind the scenes lobbying for zero tolerance policies or other sorts of school policy that facilitate a school-to-prison pipeline, but it wouldn’t be too cynical to ponder the possibility. These companies not only house a high percentage of federal/state prisoners and INS-detained undocumented immigrants, they also operate many juvenile detention centers (e.g. all of Florida’s). They are likely eager to see 5 yr. old girls get 10-day suspensions from school for “making terrorist threats” with their Hello Kitty bubble-making “gun” or 6 yr. olds get arrested for having a temper tantrum. After all, the evidence suggests these kids stand a higher chance of being future inmates once they become criminalized, they prematurely leave school, and their life options are circumscribed.  If we don’t want to just fill their cells and their coffers, it is past time to end the criminalization of children.

Business Model ...

Henry Ford may have had the best business model. 

It's still working today. 

Pay your employees enough to be able to afford your products.

The Other Hacking Scandal

UK cops knew that banks, lawyers, rich people and others routinely hired criminal hackers to spy on people, did nothing about it

The Independent reports that the UK Serious Organized Crime Agency supplied secret evidence to the Leveson Inquiry (on phone-hacking by newspapers) saying that many other groups in the UK routinely engaged in criminal, invasive hacking through private investigations firms. Included in the list of those purchasing criminal services are the super-rich, insurance companies, law firms and telecoms companies. The Leveson Inquiry took the evidence, but kept it secret, including the fact that the police knew about and tolerated this kind of activity. The spying included bribing police officers, perverting the course of justice, real-time tapping of phone lines, using specially built spying gadgets attached by BT engineers who assisted in the crimes.

A security source with knowledge of the report – codenamed Project Riverside – said clients who hired corrupt private investigators included:
* a major telecoms company;
* a celebrity who broadcasts to millions of people every week;
* a well-known media personality, who hired a private investigator to hack his employee’s computer as he suspected she was selling confidential information to business rivals;
* a businessman who hired hackers to obtain intelligence on rivals involved in an ultimately unsuccessful £500m corporate takeover.
A company which was owed money by property developers also hired private detectives to track down the firm’s family information, detailed transactions from four bank accounts, information from credit card statements and an itemised mobile phone bill. The company paid £14,000 for the information.
However, the most common industry employing criminal private detectives is understood to be law firms, including some of those involved in high-end matrimonial proceedings and litigators investigating fraud on behalf of private clients.

SOCA discovered a document called "The Blagger’s Manual" during one inquiry, which contained instructions for illegally obtaining information from "calling companies, banks, HM Revenue and Customs, councils, utility providers and the NHS." The manual read, in part, "It is probably a good idea to overcome any moral hang-ups you might have about 'snooping' or 'dishonesty.' The fact is that through learning acts of technical deception, you will be performing a task which is not only of value to us or our client, but to industry as a whole."
SOCA's report can't be retrieved via normal freedom-of-information requests, because SOCA claims it has "sensitive material." It also alleges that the corruption was often carried out by means of social connections through membership in the Freemasons, shared among police, judges, and the criminals who wished to bribe or influence them.

The other hacking scandal: Suppressed report reveals that law firms, telecoms giants and insurance companies routinely hire criminals to steal rivals' information 

Watched Not Just by the NSA

Watched Not Just by the NSA: Your de-identified DNA information can actually be identified

When a clinical research subject is asked to give permission to use his or her sample for research purposes, the subject is often told that the sample will be de-identified without a trace; therefore, privacy [...]

New death in Saudi Arabia from SARS-like coronavirus MERS

 

Saudi Arabia said another person had died of the SARS-like coronavirus MERS and six new cases were registered, as international experts said on Saturday countries should standardize their approach to treating the disease. The latest cases bring the total number infected worldwide to 70, with 39 having died since MERS was identified last year.

The experts meeting at the World Health Organization's Cairo office said countries should enhance surveillance for acute respiratory illness, quickly investigate clusters of pneumonia and report confirmed or probable MERS cases within 24 hours.

"Fast and complete reporting of cases, with contact histories, clinical care and treatment outcomes in as much detail as possible, and collected in a uniform manner across countries, is necessary," they said in an emailed statement.
Most of the cases so far have been in Saudi Arabia, where 55 people have been confirmed as having the disease, of whom 33 have died. The kingdom, birthplace of Islam, hosts millions of pilgrims each year for the annual haj pilgrimage.
The experts said in a statement after the meeting on Saturday that countries hosting mass gatherings where MERS was a risk should develop specific plans, without giving details.
While the haj does not take place this year until October, many Muslim pilgrims from around the world are expected to head for Mecca next month during the fast of Ramadan.

As well as announcing the latest death, the Saudi Health Ministry said late on Friday a 41-year-old woman in Riyadh was in a stable condition with the disease, and that a 32-year-old with cancer was also being treated.

On Thursday, it confirmed four new cases, including three health workers, who have all recovered.
Researchers said Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, is even more deadly than SARS and is easily transmitted in healthcare environments.
The disease can cause coughing, fever and pneumonia and has spread from the Gulf to France, Germany, Italy and Britain.

Genuine message

'Genuine message' in uncracked text

A mysterious coded Medieval manuscript may contain a genuine message, and is not a hoax as some claim, researchers say.

• Ancient language mystery deepens
• Alan Turing's 'suicide' in doubt
• Celebrating Alan Turing's genius
• WWII pigeon message stumps GCHQ

How Would Native Americans Teach US History?

by Four Arrows and Barbara Mann

The following are excerpts from Teaching Truly: A Curriculum to Indigenize Mainstream Education
By Four Arrows
(May, 2013 Peter Lang Publishers)
From the Preface:
Many say that public schooling is failing. The evidence offered depends upon the critic's viewpoint. Policymakers, politicians and the private education industry point to the inability of schools to meet federal mandates. Left-leaning reformers complain it is the take over of schools by corporations that defines school failure. Employers complain about job skills. Parents cry about dropout rates. Teachers refer to crumbling infrastructure and diminished finances. Students say the curricula is boring and irrelevant. On it goes. Schools are failing, but the evidence to substantiate the assertion is that life systems on Earth are at a tipping point. Schools are failing because the standards and curricula stifle even the best teachers, allowing for the harmful influences of corporatism and hegemony to continue the insanity dominating our world today. But growing numbers of teachers are ready to take control of what and how they teach in the classroom. They want practical guidelines for doing this in ways that have not been available until this book with its course specific guidelines offering both sufficient proof about educational hegemony and with clear guidelines for offering alternative and complementary lessons that can offset hegemonic influences.
It was not long ago when the U.S. government used education to harm our Indigenous neighbors to prevent the spiritual knowledge and values of Indigenous Peoples from threatening more materialistic goals. How federal education policies and common core standards today use education is not all that different, except now the same suppression of vital knowledge and values is hurting us all in ways soon revealed if not already known to the readers. As mainstream classroom teachers come to realize that standard curriculum and pedagogy have long been intended to suppress, not foster democratic ideals, they will embrace the solutions offered in this book without waiting for more school reform efforts to fail. Teaching Truly offers teachers the kind of authentic, truth-based teaching ideas most hoped they would be able to use when they first became teachers. "Partnering" mainstream curricula with Indigenous perspectives allows for such teaching. It can guide learning toward building rich, joyful relationships between diverse humans and between humans and non-human. It allows for a collaboration that can effectively counter the pitfalls of mainstream policies, politics and curriculum in ways that a more confrontational critical pedagogy alone has been unable to do.
Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman write, "True sanity must face and embrace the insanity of today's world and, in the process, offer to the temporarily insane anew awareness and a pathway to achieve harmony . . . sanity is about integrating opposites rather than taking refuge in one polarity or the other" (2009, p. 195).
There is no question that the Indigenous perspectives offered here stand in stark contrast with the Western ones most readers have embraced. Yet this "partnership" between cultural assumptions about living and learning is essential in this era of crises. We are now forced to ask ourselves, "What must we do in this crucial moment as educators? Getting this book's message and practical lesson plans into classrooms is one answer. Using this handbook will significantly help education do better that which best serves joy, balance, health and justice for all.
Note
1. In his book Theory and Resistance in Education, Henry Giroux (2001) argues that resistance is essential for authentic school reform and that studying minority values and comparing them to dominant ones is the best form of resistance. He says that this reexamination of schools must begin with a study of hegemony in the curriculum. Critical pedagogy over the years has concerned itself largely with a hegemony that is mostly oppressive of subordinate groups. Today it is the "99 percent" of the population who are beginning to realize that the goals of hegemony serve a more concentrated elite.
Excerpted from Chapter 8: United States History
With guest author, Barbara Mann
K-16 Teacher Instructions:
Adapt and use this chapter's information according to your students' ages and cognitive levels. Use it as an introduction to your standard course content or weave values,
ideas or critical reflections into it throughout the course. Encourage students to
carefully reflect on this information with the goal of deciding what mainstream ideas
are best replaced with Indigenous ones, which ones are best as they are, and how the
two might be partnered in terms of practical benefits for the students and their community (local and global). Use the questions at the end of the chapter to help with this process and to stimulate primary source research and enthusiastic, critical dialogue.
Since, in Indigenous ways of thinking, the ideas related to this subject have relevance to all the other subjects, you may want to incorporate some of this chapter's material into the study of another subject area. As with all chapters in this section, this chapter is organized as follows:
1. Corporate and Hegemonic Influences
2. Real-World Outcomes
3. Indigenous Curricular Alternatives
4. Questions for Research, Dialogue, Choices and Praxis
Indigenous Curricular Alternatives: How Indians Would Teach American History
by Barbara Alice Mann
Western scholars develop history based on war-to-war timelines, interspersed with intensive, great-man profiles. Nothing could be further from Indigenous notions of how to tell history. In the first place, Indigenous cultures assume that peace is the natural state of humanity, so war cannot be the focus. Second, particular stories belong to particular places and may be told only at particular times. Third, history consists of a set of cycles, in each of which the people learned something really important to community cohesion and survival. Fourth, Indigenous Peoples are communal and democratic, so what matters is the central event of any given cycle and how all the people fared under it, not how some elite individual distinguished himself or herself by wielding power over others. Finally, qualified Elders are listened to as they relay the many versions of each story that exists.
Each culture has its own geographical place, to which its stories are tied. The rivers that run through it, the weather, the plants, the animals, the people - everything is seen in terms of its spiritual connections to its locale. Thus, for instance, the Lenapes are called "the Grandfather Nation" because they were the first to arrive in Dawnland (the mid-Atlantic coast).
Indigenous cultures have, moreover, particular times of the year, which coincide with when particular stories are to be told. Thus the Laguna-Keres-Acoma story Kochinnenako, or Yellow Woman (Corn), is told at the change of seasons from winter to summer, which also signals the shift of civic responsibility from one half of a clan to the other. In the eastern woodlands, storytelling is not even allowed during the summer, when all the crops are being planted and tended. Everyone loves a good story, so if the Elders told stories in the farming season, everyone would stop work to listen, and nothing would get done. This is why "going ga-ga," or telling stories, is put off until harvest time.
It is interesting that settler culture in the U.S. copied the "summer is for work" notion of the woodlanders in setting up its school system. Any Indigenous teaching of history would certainly continue to respect the times of the year during which any story can be told, as well as the geographical place concepts vital to the stories.
Because the purpose of telling history is to ensure that the central lessons of the cycle at hand are understood and honored, Indigenous history would work from a consensus on what any particular story meant to the people. In this way, the Plains Peoples create what they call their "Winter Counts," officially recording the event that all agree most impacted the entire group over the previous year. Many Indigenous groups have also formal cycles covering hundreds, or even thousands, of years and comprising multiple events. Thus do the Hopi People keep "Worlds" (epochs), saying that we are today living in the Fourth World. Instead of pushing the memorization specific dates, then, Indigenous history would be clear about the cycle to which any particular story belonged and where in that cycle it fell. For instance, in the epochs of the Iroquoian tradition, the creation of the clan system occurred in the First, or Creation, Epoch, whereas invasion by the Europeans occurred in the Second, or Great Law, Epoch. As is obvious from the names, the Creation of Turtle Island, and the land life on it, was the main event of the First Epoch, whereas overthrowing oppression to create the Iroquois Constitution was the main event of the Second Epoch. Proper storytellers know the impact of all events recounted in all cycles on the people living today and make them clear. The community, not any individual, is the focus.
Cultural heroes about whom the people have many stories, such as Nanapush of the Anishinabe or Skunny Wundy of the Senecas, would be recognized as present primarily for their comic value, although small morals are also part of the stories. Some great actors, such as White Buffalo Calf Woman of the Lakotas or the United States prophet Wovoka of the Paiutes, would be mentioned, with both spiritual actors (White Buffalo Calf Woman) and human actors (Wovoka) included as real. It would, however, be the deeds of these actors, not the individuals themselves, that mattered. The impact of the deeds on the whole community, both at the time and in the present, would be emphasized over the biography of any one individual because communal peoples just do not see this or that specific individual as all important.
Biography is not an Indigenous genre.
Not everyone is viewed as qualified to tell the stories of their people, nor is only one version of an event viewed as "the one, right story." Instead, there are various recognized "Keepers" (historians) who belong to the particular lineages through which the stories have come. This is why there is always more than one version of even the most sacred traditions. Even though some versions may be generally considered better than others, all versions of a traditional story are considered simultaneously true.
This is because communal peoples work toward harmonious relations, not continual confrontation and sour spats. Everyone's point of view is respected. Consequently, Indigenous history would present all versions of every story, from all points of view, instead of imposing the view of just the most powerful or elite group on everyone.
Belonging to Elder-based cultures, Indigenous groups revere their oldest members. Youngsters do not demand stories (or anything else) from Elders. Instead, the Elders choose when and on whom to bestow a story, making the gift of history highly valuable to the recipient. Elders must be approached with great respect and humility and be asked gently to recite some of what they have "seen and heard in their travels" through life. Youngsters do not despise hearing the stories, wriggling resentfully under the telling or surreptitiously playing with their iPhones, but listen intently to comprehend what is being said. They thank their teachers when the story is done. The final exam for history, Indian-style, would evaluate the competence with which any youngster was able to repeat all versions of a story, complete with the names of the lineages through which each story came.
Thus, instead of being seen as boring, irrelevant and soon forgotten, history would be seen as a vital link to the ancestors, those that paved the way for good things and those whose mistakes offer lessons for the present. History can remind us about the spirits that continue to influence and oversee our stories. History is the opportunity for truth-seeking stories and when these stop, the people cease to exist as well.