Home Page

• A private company doing the government’s work does not face the same privacy restrictions.
• The Dangerous New Law Before Congress (CISPA)
• You Are All Suspects Now
• SOPA Mutates Into Much Worse CISPA, the Latest Threat to Internet Free Speech
• FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites -- now

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet

If you like reading this article, consider contributing a cuppa jove to Evergreene Digest--using the donation button in the above right-hand corner—so we can bring you more just like it.

[Update: The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passed the House Thursday (April 19).]

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to pass a reprehensible cyber-security bill that seeks to protect online companies—giant social media firms to data-sharing networks controlling utilities—from cyber attack. It is reprehensible because, as Democratic San Jose Rep. Zoe Lofgren said this week (April 22-28), it gives the federal government too much access to the private lives of every Internet user. Or as Libertarian Rep. Ron Paul also bluntly put it, it turns Facebook and Google into “government spies.”

But that’s not the biggest problem with the Congress’s urge to address a real problem—protecting the Internet from cyber attacks. While House passage launches a process that continues in the Senate, the bigger problem with the best known of the cyber bills before the House, CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, is not what is in it -- which is troubling enough -- but what is not on Congress’s desk: a comprehensive approach to stop basic constitutional rights from eroding in the Internet Age.

Full story...

Related:

You Are All Suspects Now. John Pilger, Truthout
What Are You Going to Do About It?


SOPA Mutates Into Much Worse CISPA, the Latest Threat to Internet Free Speech, Ethan A. Huff, Natural News

• “What CISPA will do, if passed, is remove all the legal barriers that currently stop internet service providers, government agencies, and others from arbitrarily spying on internet users.”
• Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails
• Feds Want Way to Hack Xboxes and Wiis for Evidence

FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites -- now,  Declan Mccullagh, c|net.com

• CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.
• SOPA Mutates Into Much Worse CISPA, the Latest Threat to Internet Free Speech

We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized.

Chris Hedges, Truthdig


If you like reading this article, consider contributing a cuppa jove to Evergreene Digest--using the donation button above—so we can bring you more just like it.

Illustration by Mr. Fish

In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. “The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups,” he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.

Full story...

How the Vikings Stadium Deal Went Down And Took Honest & Open Government With It.

Nick Coleman, The State I'm In

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Jim Fuller

The other Occupy Minnesota and the siege of The People's Capitol

Room 400 North in the State Office Building was a busy place Wednesday evening. People came and went, lots of them, and all of them were power players in the Vikings Stadium drama. Ostensibly, two or three members of the Legislative Conference Committee were meeting — but never more than that number. The six-member conference committee, appointed Tuesday night by House and Senate leaders to reconcile differences in the two versions of the $1 billion stadium bill that had been passed by both bodies, only needed four legislators for a quorum, and a quorum would trigger the state’s Open Meeting law, requiring that the doors to the deliberations be opened to the press and public. If you thought that was going to happen, you are still clapping for Tinkerbell.

Room 400 has a sign on the door saying it can hold up to 80 persons. It is a big room for a six-member committee that couldn’t let more than three of its members inside at any one time. But it needed to be large. Here is a partial list of the VIPs who came and went: Minneapolis Mayor Raymond Rybak; Gov. Dayton’s stadium point man Ted Mondale; Dayton’s chief of staff, Tina Smith; at least two of his commissioners in charge of budgets and revenues; lobbyists for the Vikings, including Vikings VP and CFO Steve Poppen; House GOP Majority Leader Kurt (I’m against it!) Zellers; House DFL Minority Leader Paul (I’m a liberal!) Thissen; several other senators and representatives not on the committee; staffers, secretaries and hangers-on galore. But not one member of the unwashed public or the Capitol press corps. And get this: There was another, adjacent meeting room, with a connecting door, so that if a quorum-inducing 4th member of the conference committee should inadvertently (or deliberately) walk in, one of the others could quickly slip through the door into the adjoining room – thus preserving the sanctity of the Open Meeting Laws!  (Although, truly, there was no way for anyone to know how many of the committee members were present at any time as no outsider — meaning taxpayer or reporter — could see what was happening or be certain who was present.)

Full story...

• The United States is one of the few countries in the world that puts children in supermax prisons, tries them as adults, incarcerates them for exceptionally long periods of time, defines them as super predators, pepper sprays them for engaging in peaceful protests, and, in an echo of the discourse of the war on terror, describes them as 'teenage time bombs.'
• Strip-Searching Kids?
• Trayvon Martin and the End of Excuses

Henry A Giroux, Truthout

If you like reading this article, consider contributing a cuppa jove to Evergreene Digest--using the donation button in the above right-hand corner—so we can bring you more just like it.

An Occupy Wall Street protester is detained during a march through lower Manhattan, in New York, November 17, 2011. (Photo: Robert Stolarik / New York Times)

In spite of being discredited by the economic recession of 2008, market fundamentalism has once again assumed primacy as a dominant force for producing unprecedented inequalities in wealth and income, runaway environmental devastation, egregious amounts of human suffering and what Alex Honneth has called an "abyss of failed sociality."(1)

The Gilded Age is back with big profits for the ultra-rich and large financial institutions and increasing impoverishment and misery for the middle and working class. Political illiteracy and religious fundamentalism have cornered the market on populist rage providing support for a country in which, as Robert Reich points out, "the very richest people get all the economic gains [and] routinely bribe politicians" to cut their taxes and establish policies that eliminate public goods such as schools, social protections, health care and important infrastructures.(2)

Full Story...

Related:

Strip-Searching Kids? Kristen Gwynne, AlterNet

• Instances of nonviolent youth treated like criminals -- strip-searched or shackled for minor infractions -- shed light on a widespread problem in America's schools.
• 6 Shocking Ways Our Schools Treat Students Like Criminals
• Why the Supreme Court Thinks Strip Searches Are Constitutional

Trayvon Martin and the End of Excuses, Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

• We have become a nation in which children have become expendable.
• Trayvon Martin is just the most recent example. He is not dead by accident.
• The Post-Racial Delusion