Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
Sepp Blatter resigns! Who? A corruption scandal surrounding FIFA, the governing body of professional international soccer, would devastate our view of sports were the United States the least concerned about soccer.
Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
In one of the worst kept secrets since NSA spying on Americans, Caitlyn Jenner, the trans woman known until now as Bruce Jenner, who became famous as a record-setting decathlon champion during the 1976 Olympics, now debuts her new identity in a cover story in Vanity Fair magazine.
“A photograph of Ms. Jenner, shot by Annie Leibovitz, accompanied an article on her transition to a woman after long identifying as a man named Bruce … became a sensation on social media when the magazine posted the article online,” reported The New York Times. See the magazine’s YouTube excerpt of the interview below the fold.
This is a big story because Bruce Jenner was a man who, after gender reassignment surgery, is now a woman.
Caitlyn Jenner’s first tweet under her new name — “I’m so happy after such a long struggle to be living my true self. Welcome to the world Caitlyn. Can’t wait for you to get to know her/me” — garnered more than 150,000 followers within minutes.
Public interest has been raised by Jenner’s years as a reality TV star as well as the fact that while he was once a macho athlete whose image embodied the Wheaties cereal box, he is now not a male, but a female.
The New York Post led its coverage of Jenner’s upcoming feature story: “Meet ‘Her.’”
The quotes are because, whereas she was once a he, she is not a “real” she, in the minds of the editors of the Post, because she was born a man.
Much media reaction reflected the Johnny-come-lately status of trans people in the iconography of identity politics.
While gays and, to a lesser extent, lesbians have been considered acceptable among polite company in large coastal cities among educated elites for the better part of a decade or longer, transgenderism still makes liberals uncomfortable enough that it’s okay for them to vaguely allude to their lingering bigotry even while assuming the standard welcoming “hey, that’s great” posture.
The gossip site TMZ reported, for example, that Caitlyn Jenner “did not spell her first name with a ‘K’ because she wants a clean break from the Kardashian moniker.”
Of course, Kaitlyn is no more of a standard spelling than Caitlyn.
“Sources closely associated with Bruce tell us Caitlyn wants to make it clear to her family and the world … she is her own person. That sounds obvious, but we’re told it was an extremely meaningful choice for her … she has never been her own person before, and becoming part of the Kardashian brood would undermine her goal.”
Yes. It does sound obvious. An obvious attempt to reinforce the status of trans people as firmly entrenched, for now, as The Other.
Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
The United States homeland will almost certainly be attacked by terrorists if an anti-terrorist law that has never thwarted terrorists a single time in over a decade is allowed to lapse, President Obama is warning.
“But this shouldn’t and can’t be about politics. This is a matter of national security,” the president said. He appeared to be serious.
Unless the U.S. Senate can reach a compromise over this weekend, a section of the USA Patriot Act used by the Obama Administration to validate the NSA’s mass interception, collection and storage of every American’s “telephony metadata” — details about their phone calls — will expire. (The only court to have considered the NSA program, called “Stellar Wind” and part of the Edward Snowden leaks, ruled that it is illegal because, in fact, the Patriot Act does not authorize it.)
After “Stellar Wind” came to light, top American officials including the president repeatedly said that it had thwarted at least 50 terrorist plots, including 13 in the United States. “But there’s no evidence that the oft-cited figure is accurate,” the respected journalistic watchdog ProPublica concluded.
The White House has been stalwart in its belief that NSA spying on the telephony metadata of ordinary Americans is absolutely essential to prevent foreign terrorists living overseas from attacking the United States. Just because it has never worked a single time over the last ten years in doing anything useful at all — except providing much-needed American jobs during a time of high unemployment — doesn’t mean that terrorists wouldn’t take advantage of its absence were it to go away tomorrow night, as it will if senators like Kentucky’s Rand Paul get their way.
“If some Senate Republicans believe, as the president does, that we must be vigilant in the face of terrorist threats, it would be irresponsible to let these authorities lapse, even for a few days,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday.
“If I lose these tools, it’s a huge, huge problem,” said mathematically challenged FBI director James Comey. “We use it fewer than 200 times per year, but when we use it, it matters tremendously .”
Stringing together words into sentences, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also warned of grave peril unless Congress renews Section 215. “We need to recognize that terrorist tactics and the nature of the threat have changed,” McConnell said Friday. “At a moment of elevated threat, it would be a mistake to take from our intelligence community any — any — of the valuable tools needed to build a complete picture of terrorist networks and their plans, such as the bulk data collection program.”
Be afraid. For some reason.
You’ve seen it in movies: gangsters are going to kill a guy. But before they do, they force him to dig his own grave. Who would go along with that? What are these doomed souls thinking? Why, during their final moments alive, doesn’t the victim avail himself of the chance to die defiantly, with dignity, going to his death with the small pleasure of knowing that his assassin will at least be inconvenienced by the disposal of his body?
That was the question running through my head as I read a story that made my blood boil: Disney World in Orlando, Florida recently laid off 250 tech workers and had an Indian outsourcing company supply their lower salary replacements with foreign recipients of H-1B visas. This disgusting practice, which is becoming increasingly common and is the subject of a congressional investigation and at least one lawsuit, is illegal. H-1B visas are only supposed to go to highly educated foreign workers brought to the U.S. to work for employers who can’t find American citizens to do the job — but with 3 out of 4 American techies un- or underemployed, that’s never the case.
Disney, which had a profit of $7.5 billion last year, could easily have afforded to obey federal immigration law.
If found guilty of visa fraud, Disney should be treated the same way that individual criminals get slammed by “three strikes” laws: 250 felony counts? This rogue company is too big not to be failed. It should be nationalized and its executives sent to prison for life.
The part that really got my goat was that Disney pressured its laid-off workers, many of whom had received such glowing performance evaluations that they thought they were being promoted when they were called in to meet with their bosses, to train their replacements. “I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” one of the H-1B outsourcing victims, an American in his 40s who has been unemployed since his last day at Disney on Jan. 30 told The New York Times. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”
It is astonishing how few workplace shootings there are.
Why didn’t the 250 fired workers tell Disney to go to hell, and refuse to train their replacements?
Why did they dig their own graves?
The answer is, they got paid. But not much.
Disney “offered a ‘stay bonus’ of 10% of severance pay if they remained for 90 days. But the bonus was contingent on ‘the continued satisfactory performance of your job duties.’ For many, that involved training a replacement. Young immigrants from India took the seats at their computer stations,” reported the Times.
How much cash are we talking about?
Obviously, there’s the 90 days of pay. Nonmanagerial workers laid off by Disney receive one week of pay for every full year of service. So if you worked 10 years, you’d get 10 weeks severance, plus one additional week – 10% – for the so-called “stay bonus,” for a total of 11 weeks. But to assess the net benefit, you subtract the $275 a week in unemployment benefits most workers receive in the state of Florida, as well as the 10 weeks severance the laid-off employees would have received even if they’d refused to train their replacements.
According to the corporate salary site glassdoor.com, Disney tech jobs at Orlando start at about $61,000 a year. So let’s assume that the average salary of the poor suckers pushed out the door in favor of the new guys from India was $80,000.
Disney paid the laid-off Americans $20,000 – minus income taxes, so more like $15,000 – to dig their own graves.
Look, I get it. Most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. That $15,000 looks like it’s going to matter a lot when you’re about to lose your job, especially when you are an older worker in technology, a field where age discrimination isn’t merely tolerated, but gleefully celebrated.
At the same time, how much is your dignity worth? That’s the big picture.
Victims of oppression have a responsibility not only to themselves, but to those who are suffering at the same hands, and to the next generation of victims, to resist and throw their bodies on the gears of bloodthirsty corporate capitalism. What if every worker refused, as a matter of course, to train their replacements? The resulting disruption would create a cost for the company.
What if the standard response of a laid-off employee in the United States was not to leave quietly, but to sabotage computers with viruses, trash their office, break as much equipment as possible, and go out kicking and screaming? What if every employer who tried to replace their American workers with outsourced foreigners on fraudulent H-1B visas could count on a big fat class-action lawsuit? Resistance might make some employers think twice before behaving with such disgusting impunity.
Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi wrote that the Nazis’ great triumph in their oversight of death camps was to reduce their Jewish inmates to animals, so that they would turn against one another in their desperate struggle to subsist. Levi was haunted by the horror of what he witnessed, and how easy it was to decivilize human beings. On the opposite side of the spectrum, we celebrate the heroes of the uprisings in the Warsaw ghetto and at Sobibór death camp because, though they knew they were going to die no matter what, they fought to the end.
Comrades! Don’t dig your own graves.
Not for $15,000.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the upcoming book “Snowden,” the first biography of NSA whistleblower Edward J. Snowden. It is in graphic novel form. You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
“Intelligent design” is the belief that the universe is perfectly ordered, logical and optimized, thus God exists. “The Case for Intelligent Design” explores aspects of biological design that support this thesis. This week: We look at hairs on the top of your feet.
What with the part of the earth where I live moving into more-direct alignment with the sun, it’s getting warmer. This prompts me to skip normal shoes in favor of sandals when I’m running out the door in the morning.
The first or second time I wore sandals this year, I noticed an oddly painful tug on the top of my feet. With every step I took, my sandals tugged on the hairs on the top of my feet.
This was the first time, 51 years in, that I had noticed the hairs on my feet. I knew they were there. But I never paid them any mind. I let them be, and until a few weeks ago, they did me the same favor.
Anyway, this prompts the question: What is the purpose of hairs on the top of your feet?
I called my friend the evolutionary biologist, who refused to be named for this article. “Hairs on the top of your feet,” he replied after recovering from his initial surprise at my query, “protect your bare feet from sunburn when walking in the desert. Androgenic hairs, we call them in the trade.”
“Wouldn’t it have been better for God, who does everything just so, to have given us sandals if we were meant to wander the desert?”
“He gave us big brains that allowed us to design sandals.”
“Which pull on the foot hairs that we no longer need, and instead cause us pain.”
“Got me there,” he said, excusing himself in order to pursue his biological imperative to spread his seed with a 61-year-old colleague whose husband is away this week on a book tour.
Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
A frightening survey of Americans by the Federal Reserve finds desperate poverty among a high percentage of ordinary citizens. Among the highlights: 31% of pre-retirement Americans have zero retirement savings or pensions and are planning to work until they die.
Marketed as pro-privacy reform of the rancid Patriot Act, the USA Freedom Act is about to become law. Though nothing could be further from the truth, many Americans will believe that the NSA is being reined in, and move on another issue.
The Freedom Act has been characterized as another vindication of Edward Snowden — and, considering the fact that we wouldn’t be discussing the balance between individual privacy rights and national security if he hadn’t made the NSA’s spying against us public, it is.
We’re also being told that the Freedom Act will protect us from the NSA.
It won’t.
“This is more than symbolic,” said Georgia Tech professor Peter Swire, who worked on an Obama task force that studied NSA surveillance in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
No. It isn’t.
Symbolic is exactly what the Freedom Act is.
As The New York Times reports, most of the fascism-lite Patriot Act will remain in force under the Freedom Act: “only three provisions that temporarily expired Monday are now at issue, two of which have apparently been used only rarely.” The Freedom Act mainly affects the collection of “telephony metadata”: times of phone calls, the numbers of you called and were called from, how long you were on the phone, where you were, etc.
Telephony metadata is the tip of the iceberg.
Programs like Gumfish, through which NSA agents turn on Americans’ computer cameras to spy on them at their homes — and take photos of them nude and/or while having sex— are unaffected. So will programs like Mystic, which records and stores the voice recordings of your calls for at least five years. As I write in my upcoming biography of Snowden, so do many, many of the NSA’s Orwellian assaults on decency and personal freedoms.
Within the narrow sphere of telephony metadata, the Freedom Act creates one major reform: “it would take the government out of the business of bulk collection of telephone and Internet data like the numbers, times and duration of phone calls, leaving that information in the hands of telecommunications companies instead. But the government would still have the power to systematically gain access to the data in order to analyze indirect links between callers, just as it had under the old program.”
How exactly will the NSA “systematically gain access” to metadata under the Freedom Act? It will file a request with the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court.
Which will always say yes.
The FISA Court, which never hears from privacy advocates or a lawyer for the victim being targeted, is a rubber stamp for the government. It approves every request for spying on Americans: 1856 out of 1856 in 2012, for example. In 2011, 1674 out of 1674. In 2010, 1506 out of 1506.
You get the picture.
The NSA will still get your metadata. They’ll just have to file some paperwork to get it.
The Freedom Act sucks.
What should Congress have done instead?
If an individual were breaking as many laws as the NSA, he’d face life in prison, or execution. If a corporation — one that wasn’t politically connected — were breaking as many laws, its directors would be prosecuted and it would be shut down. The bar for government conduct should be at least as high as for you and me.
As we’ve learned from Snowden, the NSA is a rogue agency.
Here’s what would fix the problem: the NSA should be shut down. Its top officials, and those of its affiliated private contracting firms, should be imprisoned. So should every public official who approved their disgusting espionage against us.
What about the terrorists? Don’t worry; we’ll still be safe. There is no evidence — zero — that the NSA has disrupted a single plot against the United States since 9/11.
Even by the incremental standards of contemporary reform, the Freedom Act is some ridiculously weak tea.
Meaningful reform would have taken the NSA out of the spying-on-Americans business entirely. After all, that’s what their charter requires. They’re only supposed to spy on foreign “signals intelligence.” Overseas. Not here.
Significant reform would have shut down all of the programs revealed by Snowden, including Mystic and Gumfish and the like.
The Freedom Act leaves us with empty symbolism.
At bare minimum, the NSA should have to apply for a search warrant from a real federal court — as opposed to the joke that is the FISA court — when it wants the phone company to turn over your telephony metadata.
“In legislation no bread is often better than half a loaf,” the progressive Robert La Follette observed a century ago. “Half a loaf, as a rule, dulls the appetite, and destroys the keenness of interest in attaining the full loaf.” With the Freedom Act, Americans are being asked to settle for a crumb.
(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new critically-acclaimed book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
America, they tell us, is exceptional.
Exceptionally wrong about how exceptional it is.
Here comes today’s New York Times to re-re-re-reconfirm that with an Opinion piece headlined “The New Dictators Rule by Velvet Fist.”
“In recent decades, a new brand of authoritarian government has evolved that is better adapted to an era of global media, economic interdependence and information technology. The ‘soft’ dictators concentrate power, stifling opposition and eliminating checks and balances, while using hardly any violence,” write Professors Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treismanmay. “These illiberal leaders — Alberto K. Fujimori of Peru, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela — threaten to reshape the world order in their image, replacing principles of freedom and law — albeit imperfectly upheld by Western powers — with cynicism and corruption.”
“Imperfectly upheld,” indeed.
Like, for example, how the democratically elected president of Venezuela – the above-mentioned Hugo Chávez was overthrown by a corporate junta backed by the CIA and the Bush administration, as well as the slobbering editorial page and front page of — ahem — the New York Times.
Or how the democratically elected president of Honduras was overthrown by military coup backed by the CIA and the Obama administration, and, oh yeah, the New York Times.
Or how Judith Miller used the Times to convince the American people who Saddam had WMDs, used to justify the disastrous Iraq War.
“The West needs to understand how these regimes work and how to confront them.”
Read on, and it doesn’t take long to see that the West, and in particular the United States, well understand how these regimes work – because the US deploys many of the same strategies and tactics to quash opposition.
“The new autocrats often get to power through reasonably fair elections. Mr. Chávez, for instance, won in 1998 in what international observers called one of the most transparent votes in Venezuela’s history,” Guriev and Treismanmay admit. This, I suppose I should concede, is different from the American model, which included two consecutive presidential elections widely viewed as having been stolen: the 2000 judicial coup d’état precipitated by the Florida recount, and the stealing of the pivotal state of Ohio in 2004 via poll manipulation, both to the benefit of George W. Bush.
“The new autocrats use propaganda, censorship and other information-based tricks to inflate their ratings and to convince citizens of their superiority over available alternatives,” say Guriev and Treismanmay.
Here, in the meat of the matter, it is difficult to see any difference between the United States and these so-called “soft dictatorships.” No American newspaper, for example, employs a socialist opinion columnist, much less a communist one – even though these leftist ideologies are very popular among American citizens. Instead, in the United States, the only acceptable “mainstream” ideological discourse takes place on what is, by global standards, the far right: militantly procapitalist, contemptuous of such liberal ideals as leniency in sentencing, opposition to the death penalty, anti-militarism, and basic social safety net policies, like paid parental leave.
“They dominate the Internet by blocking access to independent websites, hiring ‘trolls’ to flood comments pages with pro-regime spam, and paying hackers to vandalize opposition online media sites,” Guriev and Treismanmay point out. How awful! But the same thing happens here, as numerous reports of trolls hired by the Bush and now the Obama administrations attest.
“The new dictatorships preserve a pocket of democratic opposition to simulate competition.”
Um…Bernie Sanders, anyone?
“The new autocrats are not squeamish — they can viciously repress separatists or club unarmed protesters. But violence reveals the regime’s true nature and turns supporters into opponent.”
See, for example, the Obama Administration-coordinated police crackdown on the nonviolent Occupy Wall Street movement.
“And violence is not just costly — it’s unnecessary. Instead, the new authoritarians immobilize political rivals with endless court proceedings, interrogations and other legal formalities.”
Yup. The US does that too. The IRS conducts audits of political rivals. They harass them at TSA checkpoints at the airport, and when they cross US borders. They even force them into exile.
My favorite part comes at the end: “Western democracies should provide objective native-language news broadcasts to counter the propaganda and censorship.”
Can we start with the US? That would be…exceptional.
Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
There’s always plenty of cash for the Pentagon to spend on wars of choice, such as America’s military campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. But there’s nothing to get the nearly 50,000 homeless veterans from previous wars off the streets and into decent housing. It’s all about priorities and, despite what we say this Memorial Day and every other Memorial Day, taking care of the veterans who succumb to PTSD and poverty is not a priority for the military.
Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
Used to be “Al Qaeda’s number two” man was constantly getting killed, or reportedly getting killed, by the United States. Now the same pattern is repeating itself, but with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the crosshairs. How will this affect the internal office politics of ISIS?
